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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



WANTED— A New Testament Publisher! It seems 
Christianity has no publisher in New York. Anticipating 
the situation and with a view to a "windward position" in 
the business, the writer of Organized Christianity first 
sought out the printer, and then offered "proofs" to a 
prominent publisher who at once ominously remarked that 
his business depended on the Denominationalists, and 
finally refused his imprint solely because, as he said, so 
many prominent Denominationalists were personally dis- 
cussed — observing that all the publishers were subject to 
the same limitations. 

Well, first-class printers in New York are not shy of 
Christianity, in any event. 

Single copies 75 cents, postpaid. 

In quantities of twenty-five and upward, 40 cents a copy, 

net. 

EEV. K. P. KETCHAM, 

337 West Twenty-third Street, 

New York. 



MAR 6 1908 



Organized Christianity 

OR 

NEW TESTAMENT UNITY DEMANDED 

AND FEASIBLE IN THE 

TWENTIETH CENTURY 



BY 

REV. KNEELAND PLATT KETCHAM 



" To hear the Bridegroom'' s voice!" 



PUBLISHED BY THE AUTHOR 

337 West 23RD Street 

New York 

1908 



^ 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS: 
Two Copies ftectlv* 

MAR 6 1908 

^Oopyriifm ciiiry 
7cwi 10 /q0$ 
0US* A XXC, No. 

I ' COPY B, 



Copyright, 1908, by 
REV. K. P. KETCHAM 



VAN REES PRESS, 24 AND 26 VANDEVVATER STREET? NEW YORK. 



Organized Christianity 

CHAPTER I 

What is the matter with- the Protestant and 
Evangelical Churches of the twentieth century ? 

One thing is certain ; there is an evident, 
widespread, profound disappointment in the 
spiritual developments of the last seven years. 
The "Great Awakening" is indefinitely post- 
poned, the "Forward Movement" malts, and in 
this autumn of nineteen hundred and seven 
there is an ominous hush — a pervading sense of 
uncertainty and perplexity with no inspiration 
of intelligent hope from the past, and no prom- 
ise of intelligent hope from the future. It is 
as if the disciples had toiled all the night and 
taken nothing, and then when the morning was 
now come and they were weary, dreary and 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

hungry, there was no cheering", assuring voice 
of the Master, "Cast the net on the right side 
of the ship and ye shall find." 

At the opening of the century, men said, 
"The Kingdom of God is at hand; the entire 
world at last awaits the messenger of redemp- 
tion — Heaven as always with its truth and 
grace, earth as never before, with its contribu- 
tions of thought and all facilities, proffer bound- 
less resources and afford boundless encourage- 
ment." 

And necessity as well as opportunity, demand 
as well as supply, were conspicuously evident. 
Japan, China and other non-Christian nations 
were not only in sin and misery as ever before, 
but were passing all determining crises of their 
political and religious life. With them at last, 
"one day" of present opportunity was as "a 
thousand years." Moreover, necessity was upon 
the Church from within. Educated young men 
to an astounding degree turned aside from the 
ministry. Rationalism was emasculating her 

2 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

creeds. Destructive criticism was discrediting 
her Sacred Book. Church members were pre- 
vailingly worldly and not unfrequently ras- 
cally. Her pulpits in general had lost power in 
Church and world alike. 

And the darkness over Church and world 
alike, that could be felt, was felt and reckoned 
upon as at once demanding and presaging the 
dawn — the morning dawn of brighter things — 
even the "Great Twentieth Century Revival !" 
Nor were there lacking men and measures, 
leaders and schemes for its realization. 

In the fall of 1900, Mr. William Phillips 
Hall (partly in the name of what Mr. Moody 
was supposed to intend to do), with others, 
having indeed religious fervor and evangelical 
ideas and business energy and methods and 
highly confident predictions (yet on the fatal 
basis of "existing organizations"), notoriously 
failed of any "twentieth century" success. 

J. Wilbur Chapman followed with unlimited 
financial support, General Assembly patronage, 
3 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

thorough organization, untiring energy. And 
then \Y. J. Dawson, of London, with his "cul- 
ture," and R. A. Torrey with his Bible sound- 
ness and severity and zeal, and next Gipsy 
Smith, with gospel truth and exciting power, 
calling saints and sinners to ''listen." These 
indeed did not "labor in vain in the Lord," but 
they did conspicuously fail to organize the 
exodus and lead Israel out of Egypt. 

Upon all of which the Rains Horn signifi- 
cantly comments : "An apostasy or a revival ! 
That is the alternative which the Christian 
Church is facing. For nearly twenty years we 
have been marking time, but we have not been 
making progress. True, we have been adding 
wealth and numbers, but we have not been gain- 
ing power. Sporadic revivals break out in 
places, but evangelism does not spread like a 
holy contagion. There is no use blinking facts. 
Conditions are serious. But they are excep- 
tional. Compared with those of some previous 
] eriods they are discouraging, but compared 
4 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

with other epochs they appear far from 
hopeless. The march of the Kingdom 
seems to be measured by the ebb and flow of the 
spiritual tide. To-day the tide is low. It has 
been falling- steadily # since the stirring days of 
Dwight L. Moody. There are many signs that 
low-water mark has been registered, and that 
henceforth we will see a rising flood. God is 
calling the Church and individual Christians to 
higher walks of faith and duty. It must be 
either advance or apostasy. We cannot stand 
still." 

And listen to Congregational testimony : 
"Therefore there comes to-day a mighty call 
to the Church to save the life of the nation in 
saving its own life. Of the seriousness of this 
juncture there can be no question. I am con- 
tent to be called an alarmist if you will. There 
are times when the watchman must blow the 
trumpet and warn the people. I believe that 
my habit is sufficiently optimistic, but optimism 
is treachery. It is not well with the Church 
5 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

this day; it is ill with the Church. Her grip 
is loosening, her energies are flagging ; there is 
a perceptible slackening in her progress. Some- 
thing is wrong and every thoughtful man 
knows it. Something is wrong with our evan- 
gelism. What is it? Is it the higher criticism 
and the new theology? Read Dr. Brown's 
sober, searching, candid review of the Chapman 
meetings in Oakland: 'All the churches, of 
every name, cooperated most cordially. These 
churches were crowded (with church members) 
every day for weeks; the theology of all the 
preaching was above suspicion ; the higher criti- 
cism was put to shame, and sociology was not 
so much as mentioned; but the great outside 
multitude, the multitude of the unchurched, was 
practically untouched.' " 

And here is Episcopal testimony ; "I am in 

favor of a change. I do not know what is the 

best way of doing things in the churches, but 

I know the way we are doing now is not the 

6 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

best way, or the world would be nearer its 
salvation than it seems to be." 

And the Presbyterian : "Now to be wholly 
frank in so momentous a matter, in the present 
attitude and aim and effort of the ministry there 
is not even a shadow of hope for the lost world 
of this generation, even if there be for any of 
the next ten generations. The awful outlook 
of a thousand millions of the human race pass- 
ing on to hopeless death, has the dreadful prom- 
ise of being monotonously repeated with each 
successive generation, away into the indefinite 
future! Is not this the real state of the case? 
And if so, is it not high time to 'awake out of 
sleep' — this sleep of death? If God's work is 
to go forward at the pace set for it by Christ 
in the great Commission and by the 'signs of 
the times,' the impulse must be given by a 
mighty and complete transformation of the life 
and conception and purpose and work of the 
ministry. Is not that patent to every one who 
7 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

has breadth enough of spiritual vision to take 
in the present conditions and needs?" 

At the beginning of the century it seemed 
to the writer so evident that an epoch of 
supreme transition was at hand — and that of 
the "Hosts of Christ's Triumphal March, for 
which alone," as Dante says, "these spheres 
have rolled and reap their harvests" — that of 
these hosts, the unseen, the invisible, the celes- 
tial division was in fact already marching on, 
and that God was imperatively calling the 
earthly cohorts to fall in line and to fall in line 
according to His own New Testament plan of 
campaign, that he published in the New York 
Tribune of January 7, 1901, the following pro- 
test : 

"To the Editor of the Tribune. 

Sir : Can you put me forth a little space 
in which to suggest some elemental considera- 
tions to William Phillips Hall and his coadju- 
tors in their most praiseworthy plan for a deep- 



ORGAXIZED CHRISTIANITY 

er religious life on the part of all of us for 
the twentieth century? 

First — Where the divine and human are at 
all in rivalry, the human — as we all theoretically 
admit — must unconditionally surrender, and 
wherein God's Christianity and man's Church 
are in competition the Church must give way 
or he brought to confusion, and 'her candlestick 
removed out of its place' sooner or later. 

Second — According to the Bible, and, in- 
deed, the guileless honesty of all Christian pray- 
ers, men, singly or organically, are 'earthen 
vessels,' and until first of all and unqualifiedly 
polarized, in thought, heart, plans, associations 
to Jesus Christ, in supreme aims, and to the 
Holy Spirit in supreme applications and de- 
pendence, are doomed to paralysis, blundering, 
failure. 

Third — The Apostolic Christians rose from 
utter weakness to world-wide power, from ig- 
norance and feebleness to the conquest of hu- 
manity in all its extent and variety outward, 
9 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and its depravity downward, in setting aside 
everything- of creeds or ritualistic ceremonials 
or formulations of organization, until each and 
all, with a glowing passion of enthusiasm, had 
accepted Christ in His love and His law, as 'the 
Head of all things to the Church,' 'in whom 
all fullness dwelt,' and experienced accordingly 
the all corrective, all restraining, all constrain- 
ing enchantment of the Holy Ghost. Their 
Bible, like our Bible, mentioned fasting, Sab- 
bath observance, ordinations, baptism, the 
Lord's Supper, but with not a word of primary 
and absolute legislation as to any particulars of 
any of them, and to this end, that these might 
take their place duly in and after organization 
before the all preeminent Christ, and with all 
the infinite advantages in the determining and 
administration of them, that the Spirit of God 
would subsequently and consequently give. 

This the early and victorious Christians 
fully understood and observed, and we, too, 
understand and observe it in part, and suffi- 
10 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ciently to condemn ourselves before earth and 
heaven in that we do not altogether accept it 
as the Apostles did. We are saying : 'Let us 
rise to New Testament conceptions of Christ 
and the Holy Ghost and the promise, the law, 
the liberty of them, and so organized let us then 
determine as to our Church fasting and prayers 
and praises and giving and Sabbath observance, 
and all sorts of particulars as to rites and 
creeds. Yet now, after all, let us keep back 
part of the price, let us have some reserva- 
tions, let us hold back and organize around 
something for our own human glory and grati- 
fication, the celebration of our own opinions 
and convictions, aside from and below the 
heavenly heights of Christ and the Head.' 

So the Presbyterian says : 'My creed, my 
standards first !' And the Baptist says : 'No 
creed but the Bible! Yet not after all entirely 
— not entirely the Bible plan of Christ, and the 
Holy Ghost first, and then ordinances — but let 
us have one exception, the mode and subjects 
ii 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

of Baptism, first, and then Christ and the Holy- 
Ghost !' And, correspondingly, other sectarians 
make exceptions and insist on some ritualistic 
or historic or dogmatic name to be put in be- 
fore 'the Name' which, by God's unalterable 
and eternal decree, is, for truth and rite and 
life and organization of earth, and for heaven 
beyond, 'above every name.' 

And as a result of all this we see, for in- 
stance, in Presbyterian pulpits and at Baptist 
communion tables, men freely accepted who 
openly confess that they have no passion of 
heart or thought for Christ, and no imploring 
eagerness for the Holy Spirit's ministries, and 
men rejected of whom, in their quadration of 
quest and love and faith and zeal, as God has 
appointed these, 'the world is not worthy !' 

Fourth — As far as appears, God cares very 
little for terrestrial, low-down, far-off 'unity.' 
What the New Testament and the present 
higher socialism, and thoughtful philosophers 
of humanity, and government commissioners 
12 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and army and navy commanders, returning 
from heathen lands, and the awakening heathen 
themselves demand, is a general and unquali- 
fied rallying of Christians around and for genu- 
ine Christianity — around and for the lonely, 
but all accessible Height of Christ, where God 
meets men ! 

Gentlemen of the twentieth century evan- 
gelism, you have your work cut out for you 
already. For a Christianity of power, for the 
fellowship of God's children, and the confession 
of Christ before men and the plans and organ- 
ization of redemption work which belong to 
Christianity — Christ first, and everything after ! 
Until you reach His height, failure is yours, 
and what is more, when you have gained that 
strategic, that sacred, that all commanding 
acropolis, you will have no time or energies or 
appetite for — as, indeed, you will have no need 
for — any subordinate or rival station below. 

The twentieth century preacher, in his 
closet and his study, consumed in prayers to 
!3 



ORGAXIZED CHRISTIANITY 

God and thoughts for God and man, and the 
twentieth century layman laying aside every 
weight' as he 'runs' and looks,' will thus 'find' 
his 'life,' and the Church her organization, her 
development, her mission, her 'joy and crown,' 
and thus, fully satisfied at last — how, how have 
all been straitened until this was accomplished ! 
From all directions of earth and heaven the one 
call is for God's Christianity. Shall we hear 
it?" 

Yes, and from earth and heaven shall we 
hear, if we have ears to hear, not only the call 
for God's Christianity, but as well, definite and 
indeed revolutionary specifications under the 
call. 

This explains the unique and illuminating 
career of D wight L. Moody and in this "he 
being dead yet speaketh," and to a degree prob- 
ably not at all fully appreciated even by his own 
children. 

Not since the days of the apostles has a man 
14 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

anywhere on this planet been more clearly en- 
dorsed of heaven and believed in by men, as 
God's messenger, than he. Whether weighed 
in the balances of a city reporter or a humble 
pastor, or a cultured thinker, or Catholic in 
Ireland, or prelate in England, or "double dis- 
tilled" Presbyterian in Scotland, or sailor on 
the sea, or soldier on the main, or any critical 
men of church or world in his own land, the 
one reverent verdict upon his work has been : 
"This is the finger of God" ; and upon himself : 
"He is right with God." 

And now all this in what peculiar and sig- 
nificant twentieth century interpretations from 
the Heavenly Headquarters ? These : 

i. That spiritual power experienced or trans- 
mitted is not confined to the highly organized, 
historic Churches. 

2. That these have no advantage whatever 
in the operations of God-given power. 

3. In the events and experiments of the 
Churches since his day, the revolutionary and 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

startling lesson that divine power, in the ap- 
pointed measure and conquests of it, will be 
denied to persons and establishments, in any 
marked degree diverging from Mr. Moody's 
evidently New Testament spirit and Christo- 
centric ideals — that the one coming hope of the 
Church and of humanity is in Christianity as 
discriminated from "Churchianity" and in an 
evangelical creed as distinguished from denomi- 
national "standards.'' 

The shechinah voice of Israel in the wilder- 
ness to-day is, 'Them that honor Me, I will 
honor," and "You have got to confess Christ 
before men !" 

And there are other handwritings on the wall 
of the ecclesiastical palace. Twenty years ago 
the sectarians were served with eviction notices 
in the providential discovery of the "Teaching 
of the Apostles." In this Baptists were noti- 
fied that baptism by immersion only was really 
unscriptural ; Presbyterians that infant baptism, 
and teaching, as distinguished from ruling 
16 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

elders, had no scriptural support; and Episco- 
palians that the three orders of Bishop, Priest 
and Deacon were unauthorized. Nevertheless, 
as it is most edifying to observe as a new il- 
lustration of the familiar fact that, as Herbert 
Spencer says, "organizations are rarely re- 
formed from the inside," during all the twen- 
ty years these significant warnings of coming 
dispossession have been unanimously and studi- 
ously ignored by all the denominationalists. 
Said the small boy, reminded by the nurse of 
his mother's unwelcome order, "Stop 'minding 
me, I's trying to forget it." 

And in more recent days the divine "rising up 
early and speaking" in these respects, has been 
strikingly illustrated in the publications of up- 
to-date and thorough-going scholars — Rudolph 
Sohm for example. It is scarcely conceivable 
that any intelligent mind-free man could read 
Sohm's "The Church and Its Origin in 
Primitive and Catholic Times," as interpreted 
by Walter Lowrie, without being satisfied 
1/ 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

that in a New Testament organization of 
Christianity there must be the vital head- 
ship of Christ in the love of God and 
the power and demonstration of the Holy 
Spirit at the centers, with all matters of 
rite and ceremony, offices and officers, creed and 
code, remanded to the background — the back- 
ground of Christian liberty and executive ex- 
pediency. But what manner of man would the 
minister be who at the present day could at all 
accurately represent the New Testament per- 
sonality ? And what the manner of the modern 
New Testament organization? You would 
probably detect a fairly accurate answer to the 
first question in a composite portrait of Dwight 
L. Moody and Richard S. Storrs, and to the 
second, in a slightly extended and modified 
Young Men's Christian Association, as all or- 
dained and marshalled under the banner in- 
scription, "Bible principles to please God and 
business principles to win men !" 

It ought never to be forgotten, as quite fla- 
18 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

grantly and frequently it undoubtedly is, that 
the issues of the present hour are referred to 
power — not so much light as power. The 
question of a man just now is not "Is he pre- 
sumably or possibly a Christian?" but, "Is he 
a Christian duly experiencing and exerting 
power?'' Says Herbert Spencer: "An over- 
valuation of teaching is necessarily a concomi- 
tant of this erroneous interpretation of mind. 
Everywhere the cry is educate, educate, edu- 
cate ! Everywhere the belief is that by such 
culture as schools furnish, children, and there- 
fore adults, can be molded into the desired 
shapes. It is assumed that when men are 
taught what is right they will do what is right ; 
that a proposition intellectually accepted will 
be morally operative. Yet this conviction is 
contradicted by every-day experience." Yes, 
and spiritual facts correspond with this phi- 
losophy. 

The up-to-date demand is not for any ecclesi- 
astical unity of Roman Catholic, Episcopalian, 
19 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, Congrega- 
tionalist and a score of others, on the basis of 
a minimum of possible Christian experience, 
but for organized unity on the basis of New 
Testament conditions of power. What are 
these — and what is, indeed, New Testament 
Christianity? Most portentous, delusive and 
pernicious are the current replies given in these 
days by journals, such as the Outlook and In- 
dependent, and by multitudes of more or less 
"new" theologians, to the simple question — 
What is Christianity? 



20 



CHAPTER II 

And what is God's New Testament Chris- 
tianity, as to ends and means ? The first speci- 
fied end of Christian aims is the exaltation of 
Jesus Christ. As to this point, to be sure, analy- 
sis fails, and Christ as "All and in all," in the 
first stages, preempts the entire domain of a 
Christian's activities, as at once end and means. 
"For Him are all things, by Him are all 
things." God, indeed, has not been pleased to 
declare to us the philosophy of the matter — the 
reasons why Christ "having humbled Himself 
and become obedient unto death, even the death 
of the Cross, wherefore God also hath highly 
exalted Him and given Him a name which is 
above every name," but the revelations of the 
fact glow with celestial radiance in gospels and 
epistles alike, and with ineffable reflections 

21 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

from the bright world of which, in the "glory 
of God," the record is, "the Lamb is the light 
thereof," and from art and music and philoso- 
phy and poetry and history — as well as piety 
and hymnology, of "this present evil world." 

The first great constraint upon a Christian 
as to his sonship or his discipleship, is to follow 
Christ. This was the primal law of discipleship 
when He was upon the earth, and it is the 
same now. The present "follow me" from the 
celestial shores is just as plain as the "follow 
me" of the shores of Galilee and means the 
same : humble, penitential, absolute subordina- 
tion, the most unqualified, enthusiastic, passion- 
ate, joyful devotion, the most unquestioning 
and reposeful confidence, in childlike depend- 
ence, and the most hallowed and affectionate 
and all constraining and all contributive per- 
sonal intimacy, and ever more and more, exact 
imitation in character, speech, action. St. Paul, 
so eagerly polarized for highest, noblest aims, 
records "in Christ" thirty-three times. 

22 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Says Dr. Robert F. Coyle, speaking for thou- 
sands of his fellow Christians, Presbyterian 
and otherwise, and unconsciously portraying 
spiritual campaigns : "To be a Christian is 
first and last and midst, a personal relation to 
the Lord Jesus Christ. Love for Him, devo- 
tion to Him, enthronement of Him in the af- 
fections, in the will, in the whole life — that is 
what it means. It is the union of my soul, your 
soul with Christ, as the branch is in the vine 
and the vine in the branch. All other questions 
are subsidiary and unessential ; this personal re- 
lationship is vital and fundamental. . . . That 
is what it is to be a Christian, to be loyally, 
devotedly, unalterably attached to Christ. Be- 
gin there and everything else will take care of 
itself. Doctrines and creeds will fall into their 
proper places, morality will be shot through 
and through with life, and conversion will be a 
matter of daily occurrence, a daily pledge of 
fealty to Jesus." 

But an interesting practical question emerges 
23 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

at this point. Are Dr. Coyle and his fellow 
Presbyterians, and fellow Christians generally, 
executively consistent ? Have they attained or 
are they striving to attain, an organic realiza- 
tion of Christianity on this, their own basis — 
according to their own concessions — in the line 
of the New Testament and experimental prin- 
ciples what they advocate ? 

•At the conclusion of a thoughtful article on 
"Federation," in 1902, Dr. Daniel H. Evans 
says : "My own 'personal conclusion is that 
God is exercising over the varied parts of His 
beloved Church, a kind and impartial super- 
vision; and that, with a view to fulfill His de- 
sire for the paramount object of saving the 
world by His Spirit, He is drawing His peo- 
ple into tender sympathy and active coopera- 
tion ; that in the divine process of evolution, we 
have reached the stage of federation, and that 
the growth of a widespread spiritual life from 
within will ultimately compel the devoutly to- 
be-wished consummation of a real hearty and 
24 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

holy organic union of the Church of our Lord 
and Saviour Jesus Christ." And at the open- 
ing he remarks : "We are not, in connection 
with this topic, to consider what was the origi- 
nal condition and the divine intention; for at 
first the Church was one and our Lord prayed 
for the unity of its members. Xor are we to 
dwell upon the Kingdom of God as it shall shine 
in the light of the millennial glory; for that 
union will then characterize the Church, I think 
all will allow. But at present, with things as 
they are, is union practical or even possible? 

"We remember that denominational differ- 
ences by lapse of time have been strengthened 
into traditions, and that they are fortified by 
conscientious interpretations of Scripture. The 
varying shades of theology are as fixed as the 
inborn temperament of men. There is besides 
a wide range of taste as to modes of worship 
which cannot be changed in a day. There is 
on the other hand, however, a practical possi- 
bility for the gathering of religious forces in 
25 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

behalf of evangelical work and moral reform 
and civic regeneration." 

But why is there this "practical possibility" 
for federation and not for all the ends of Chris- 
tianity by the appointed New Testament plan 
of organization ? Because, as here in fact con- 
ceded, of men's multiform obstinacy in "de- 
nominational differences," which appear in 
countless "traditions" and "interpretations" and 
"shades of theology" and "tastes as to modes of 
worship." All which duly interpreted means 
that God is indeed now calling upon His chil- 
dren to unite, to organize before and for Jesus 
Christ, but that from numberless biases and 
habits of religio-intellectual self-gratification, 
they refuse the Saviour's divine administration 
of spiritual and practical headship, and do as 
they please. 

And are not Doctors Coyle and Evans to- 
gether unconsciously charging their orthodox 
and Trinitarian brethren with an offence close- 
ly corresponding to Unitarianism ? Yea, verily, 
26 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

with a heterodoxy more inveterate than that of 
Unitarians, who do indeed subordinate the all 
divine Christ in the categories of the Trinity, 
and degrade Him from His due personal rank 
in the Kingdom of God? What have we here, 
indeed, but God's orthodox children subordi- 
nating Christ to themselves in His administra- 
tive functions? 

"Organization ought to be for, and before 
Christ the Head," they say. "It shall be for 
and before our denominational difference, tra- 
ditions, inborn temperaments, tastes in wor- 
ship — our biases and self indulgence." Uni- 
tarians slight Christ in a false philosophy ; these 
in false, delusive self-esteem. 

The Federation convention of November, 
1905, shut the doors in the face of Unitarians, 
while a keen bird's ear listening to the proceed- 
ings, first to last, would have detected these 
unconscious deliverances : 

"1. God's children are now peremptorily 
called to be duly organized under Christ's per- 
27 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sonal leadership, in the power of the Holy 
Spirit, for knowledge, experience, work. Or- 
ganic unity is now demanded by God's word 
and the present-day facts. 

2. They could be, only the Christians have 
intrenched themselves in imposing institutions, 
vested interests and pride of personal debate 
and acquired attachments. So organic unity 
will be difficult. 

3. The thirty sets of Federators positively 
refuse to forego themselves and accept God and 
the facts, and say, 'We will enter no organiza- 
tion of Christianity except our thirty sets of 
denominational biases are provided for first' 
So organic unity will be impossible." 

The summons of the "Next Great Awaken- 
ing" will be for Unitarians and Trinitarians 
alike to honor Christ as God has appointed, as 
the first supreme objective of organized Chris- 
tian thought, affection, activity, anticipation ! 

The second special end of New Testament 
Christianity is development of Christian char- 
28 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

acter; a studied development, rapid, steady, 
comprehensive, symmetrical; a development of 
mind in the knowledge of the truth and capacity 
for the truth ; of soul, in faith and love mount- 
ing upward, and love and purposes pushing out- 
ward, in the happy and indeed ecstatic ex- 
perience of those who are "pure in heart," and 
"see God." 

New Testament Christianity calls for persons 
all aglow in the loveliness, the attractions of 
self-control, self-sacrifice, genial altruism and 
withal sunny speech from fresh and winning 
thought showing forth, without, as projected 
reflections from the transcendent "beauty of 
holiness" within, and for communities and as- 
semblies pervaded, actuated, sanctified by a 
Zeitgeist, which is not simply parallel with and 
dependent upon any earth-born spirit of the 
times, but which is due to the educations and 
inspirations of God Himself! 

The third end of Christian aims is Christian 
fellowship — the outreaching love, fruitful and 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

realized in mutual patience, forgiveness, char- 
ity, sympathy and multiform helpfulness — with 
fitting communion in and with the Lord, at His 
table and otherwise, and such speaking one to 
another as the Lord, hearkening, shall hear — as 
He opens a "book" of gracious "remembrance" 
and says, "They will be mine." 

Fourth, Christian work: Every Christian go- 
ing forth as an ambassador for Christ, con- 
straining sinful and miserable men, near and 
far, to be "reconciled to God" — every Christian 
constraining a fellow Christian to deeper knowl- 
edge, deeper spirituality, deeper consecration. 
The Christian is indeed to abound in other- 
worldness in his character and prayers, but 
after all, for just this — that he may abound in 
this-worldness in his activities. His "life is 
hid with Christ in God," indeed, yet no Chris- 
tian is permitted to register himself as a heaven- 
ly absentee from earth's sins and sorrows and 
problems, moral, social and political. His head- 
quarters, his "heart's true home," is in heaven, 
30 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY . 

but as an excitedly interested, busy, eager com- 
muter, he must regularly come to earth for busi- 
ness. His heart passion may be above the 
world — his hand passion must be down here. 

To quote from Dr. D. S. Gregory : "Who 
that has made the experiment, has not found 
greater help from the intercourse with Brain- 
erd and McCheyne and Hannington — and just 
because their struggle Godward was made safe 
and noble by their earnest life of action — than 
from the contact with the fascinating and in- 
tense, but narrow, monkish, impractical, Rom- 
ish spirit of the author of the 'Imitation of 
Christ?' " 

And says Dr. J. H. W. Stuckenberg : "The 
true Church will be reformatory in social mat- 
ters in exact proportion to the depth and purity 
and efficiency of its spirituality. It will be as 
natural for it to seek to promote economic 
equity, to purify politics, to regenerate institu- 
tions, to uplift the masses, to establish hospi- 
tals, orphan asylums and reformatories and 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

to relieve poverty and all forms of misery, as it 
is for the sun to shine. These 'works of God' 
have their warrant in the works of Christ and 
the apostles, in the deeds of the early Church, 
in the merciful activity of Christians in all 
ages, and in the doctrines and spirit of the New 
Testament." 

The fifth end of New Testament Christianity 
is anticipating heaven, which, however, like 
happiness, will be realized incidentally and as 
an insured way-side result of due regard for 
Christ, holiness, unity and energetic activity. 

These, plainly — according to gospels and 
epistles alike, and the concurrent testimony of 
personal piety and general Church history of 
all lands and all periods for nineteen hundred 
years — are the ends of New Testament Chris- 
tianity. 

But what of the means ? Of course anybody, 

anything — a flower, a bird, a laughing child, a 

conceited scientist or self-satisfied philosopher, 

or higher critic, or "new" theologian, or a 

32 



ORGAXIZED CHRISTIANITY 

stingy or "tainted money" rich man, or a mean 
poor man, or a bigoted Churchman, or self- 
gratifying denominationalist, or a prayerless 
and greedy church member, or indeed a godless 
sinner — can contribute to Christianity on the 
circumference. But the life question, and the 
eternal life question is : What are the appoint- 
ed and authenticated agencies — the means en- 
dorsed of God and experience for appropriate 
pozver — for Christianity in genuine, character- 
istic, adequate effectiveness, at the centers? 

And it is to be remarked at the outset, that 
the secret of Christianity is not in any knowl- 
edge prior to, or in rivalry with, or independent 
of the inspired Word of God; nor any more in 
any dead-level creed which, however orthodox 
and comprehensive, has no fitting recognition 
of perspective — of the facts and principles 
which God has made forever preeminent. 

And then positively, the secret of Christianity 
may be epitomized in Theism and Heroism. 
We are sorely troubled in these days with 
33 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

atheism and egoism. Men gently, timidly mur- 
mur, "We believe in God the Father Al- 
mighty," and vociferously and confidently 
shout, "We believe in ourselves !" — and, as a 
result, God not honored, is consequently not 
operative. 

But what are the elements which belong to 
true, effective Theism ? The answer is : Due 
regard for God's Word in its divinity, inspira- 
tion, authority; due regard for God's highly 
exalted Son in his claims and benefactions ; due 
regard for God's Holy Spirit in his efficiency — 
and all, with radiant hope indeed, yet with the 
rational humility, self-abasement and self-sus- 
picion which the guilty meanness within, so de- 
clared of God and discovered of men, when 
they have truly "found themselves," calls for. 

Nor in this holy quest of life are these ele- 
ments to be taken seriatim, but collectively, like 
several ingredients of one prescription, simul- 
taneously and cooperatively. The three-fold 
theism and heroism work for life, not only one 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

of them sometimes, but both of them all the 
time, in every person and every experience. 
The Princeton theological student who at his 
graduation declared that he was less prepared 
to preach when he left than when he came, il- 
lustrated this. For three years he had been dili- 
gent, but fatally partial. He had assiduously 
studied his Bible, but forgotten Christ, the Holy 
Spirit and activities. 

The first of the sacred triad of our life hopes 
is God's Bible — for light of what or how so 
indispensable, and on its own premises, so all- 
sufficient and so all-exclusive ! And behold the 
proffered substitutes for it. Here is the Roman 
Church, pushing to the front its priests and rites 
and side-tracking the Bible; and with what 
spiritual success? Let the deplorable mental, 
moral and spiritual paralysis of southern Italy, 
Spain and South American States make an- 
swer. And then in all ages outside the Church, 
and in this versatile age within the Church, we 
note the rationalistic exaltation of man's nat- 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ural inborn "religious consciousness" — not to 
be sure in fact his thought, but his sentiments, 
not his reason, but his impressions, and these 
for first discrediting the Bible, and then as 
furnishing a substitute for it. Soon, however, 
these to "perish with the using" ; for when men 
like the prodigal come to themselves, when men 
either as individuals or communities realize, 
when the great life exigencies of sin or grief 
or duty or sickness or death appall, like the 
mighty-minded John Stuart Mill, in his unas- 
suaged anguish of bereavement at Avignon, 
they cry for higher, holier light than any to be 
found in themselves, or any other men. Yes, 
this old rationalism in its new guises, repu- 
diated at once by God and man, will in any new 
dawning of the day or arising of the day-star, 
vanish again, from the Church, and, in due sea- 
son, at last from the earth. Meanwhile the 
men of liberal thought have become a spectacle 
to men and angels. They boast complacently 
that their science and criticisms have discred- 

36 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ited the divine authority of the Bible as a vol- 
ume, and as to all particulars indeed, except 
a few chosen ones endorsed and made authentic 
by their own diversified vagaries. So they dis- 
card our Saviour's divinity, miraculous birth 
and deeds and vicarious death and resurrection. 
"But let us now hold to His ethical teachings 
and example — and perhaps resurrection," they 
are saying. By what testimony ? What do we 
know of His words and works, having no au- 
thenticated and reliable record? The lunatic 
who sawed off a branch on which sat his 
friends, over whom he gleefully exulted as soon 
to be sprawling in helpless discomfiture below, 
forgot that he sat on the same branch and out- 
side the saw, and soon was seen groveling in 
the very humiliation and discomfiture which he 
had so cheerfully predicted and provided for 
the others. When the Bible is dispensed with, 
it is totally gone in its reliability, and any 
one man's exceptional specialties of light 
and hope are gone with the rest, and no 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

weak and fantastic dreams of a sinful 
and morally deranged man can reclaim them. 
"Let us cast the Bible on the dust-heap or in 
the waste-basket — but hold — let us each, after 
all, for life and immortality, according to the 
passing fancy of each, fish out the Truth, and 
so live, and help to live." 

In the Outlook of September 23, 1905, Jacob 
Riis gives a beautiful and most instructive 
translation of Jorgensen's "Strand from 
Above." From a tree above, an enterprising 
spider had let himself down to the hedge below 
by a firm, well-anchored strand, to which he 
skilfully attached the web of his future home 
and occupation. As he prospered he grew ex- 
acting and self-important, and one overcast and 
depressing evening he inspected his strands. 
"At the farthest end of the web he came at last 
to a strand that all at once seemed strange to 
him. All the rest went this way or that — the 
spider knew every stick and knob they were 
made fast to — every one. But this preposter- 

38 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ous strand went nowhere — that is to say, went 
straight up in the air and was lost. He stood 
up on his hind legs and stared with all his 
eyes, but he could not make it out. To look 
at, the strand went right up into the clouds, 
which was nonsense. The longer he sat and 
glared to no purpose, the angrier the spider 
grew. He had quite forgotten how on a bright 
September morning he himself had come down 
this same strand. And he had forgotten how, 
in the building of the web and afterward when 
it had to be enlarged, it was just this strand he 
had depended upon. He saw only that here was 
a useless strand, a fool strand, that went no- 
where in sense or reason, only up in the air, 
where solid spiders had no concern. . . . 

'Away with it !' and with one vicious snap 
of his angry jaws he bit the strand in two. 

That instant the web collapsed, the whole 
proud and prosperous structure fell in a heap, 
and when the spider came to, he lay sprawl- 
ing in the hedge with the web all about his head 
39 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

like a wet rag. In one brief moment he had 
wrecked it all — because he did not understand 
the use of the strand from above." 

To any thoughtful man the "strand from 
above" is the only reliable cord of light and 
hope to depressed and straitened humanity, and 
when in the pride and wantonness of human 
conceit this, in the repudiation of the Bible, 
is wilfully snapped, the spiritual disaster is 
complete. 

In the precarious voyage of the soul, the 
captain who looks into the hold of the ship for 
either the stars, or the telescope of his own 
rude and guess-work construction, will be 
stranded. After remarking, "A secular jour- 
nal in England received in the course of three 
months nine thousand communications from 
people seeking for light on the religious ques- 
tion" — "never before has there been such a 
crisis in the history of belief" — Prof. Goldwin 
Smith — himself a comet and not a star — 
writes : "One clergyman it seems denies the 
40 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

infallibility of the Bible and treats the Church 
as an association for general improvement. A 
second finds in the Bible inaccuracy and worse. 
A third professes to believe only so much of 
the Bible as commends itself to his judgment 
— the three eminent clergymen, it is to be 
feared, are sliding down a slippery incline, on 
which no permanent foothold is to be found." 
Yes, and sliding "not alone" in their unbeliev- 
ing or self-believing temerity, and the third is 
sliding down just as unmistakably and fatally 
as the others. 

In the preface of his book, "The Inner 
Light," Dr. Amory H. Bradford says: "The 
teaching of the book may be condensed as fol- 
lows : There is in every man light sufficient 
to disclose all the truth that is needed for the 
purposes of life; that light is from God who 
dwells in humanity, as he is immanent in the 
universe; therefore the source of authority is 
to be found within the soul and not in external 
authority of church, creed or book. That light 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

being divine must be continuous ; it will never 
fail ; it will lead into all truth and show things 
to come; and it may be implicitly trusted." He 
then proceeds to show that the Bible and the 
men of the Church are not to be trusted. Of 
the latter he asks : "Is not the Church com- 
posed of men? Are not men always limited 
and fallible? By what process do fallible men 
when brought together into a society become 
infallible ?" 

Yes, and the question at once arises : By 
what process do fallible men like Dr. Bradford 
and his liberal friends become infallible? As 
he truly declares, the Churchmen are limited 
and fallible, and yet in fact they have ever had 
and have now all the advantages of Inner Light 
and spiritual indwelling that Dr. Bradford has, 
and if these men of the Church are not an au- 
thority, wherein appears his reliability, in any- 
thing in which he repudiates or distrusts the 
Bible? The record of the men of the Church 
is conclusive against them, he says. Is the 
42 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

record of liberal thinking any more attractive 
and convincing? 

To take a single specimen from the writings 
of R. J. Campbell, of the London City Tem- 
ple : "Sin itself is a quest for God — a blunder- 
ing quest, but a quest for all that. The man 
who got drunk last night did so because of 
the impulse within him to break through the 
barriers of his limitations, to express himself, 
and to realize the more abundant life. His 
self-indulgence just came to that; he wanted, 
if only for a brief hour, to live the larger life, 
to expand the soul, to enter untrodden regions, 
and gather to himself new experiences. That 
drunken debauch was a quest for life, a quest 
for God. Men in their sinful follies to-day, and 
their blank atheism, and their foul blasphemies, 
their trampling upon things that are beautiful 
and good, are engaged in this dim, blundering 
quest for God, whom to know is life eternal. 
The roue you saw in Piccadilly last night, who 
went out to corrupt innocence and to wallow 
43 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

in filthiness of the flesh, was engaged in this 
blundering quest for God." 

Other quotations — not equal to this extraor- 
dinary specimen indeed, but going to show that 
"liberal" men are no more to be trusted as ulti- 
mate authority than the Churchmen — might be 
given, and given from the pages of the Outlook, 
of which Dr. Bradford is one of the editors. 
The fact is, this delusive cult is based on a sen- 
timental egoism which can be expressed at a 
distance in books and articles, but not face to 
face with men and facts in a pulpit. Dr. Brad- 
ford is much too faithful to his Montclair flock, 
and to the Chief Shepherd of the same, and 
to his own better self indeed, than to stand up 
in his pulpit to say : "You cannot trust your 
Bibles, you cannot trust the Church ministers 
or the creed-making ministers, even though 
they have had equally with us the Spirit and 
the Inner Light; but you can trust me and 
such as I am, with our Spirit and our Inner 
Light." 

44 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

"Nor is there any way of salvation for us 
but unwavering and untrammelled pursuit of 
truth," says Gold win Smith — with a countless 
chorus of liberal echoes. True; but the pur- 
suit of truth is with the hosts of the self-trust- 
ers — like "following conscience," as Dr. Will- 
iam Adams describes it — "as a man follows a 
wheel-barrow which he is steadily pushing be- 
fore him with all the obstinacy of a determined 
will." These load up the wheel-barrow with 
their own negations and imaginations — push it 
energetically before them, and call it following 
the truth. 

As has been well said of the "multiplied 
dogmas which are now asking for acceptance 
on the ground that they are based on the re- 
ligious consciousness, and must be received be- 
cause the religious consciousness is endorsing 
them, we are familiar with their range, their 
style, their coloring. They relate to the nature 
and character of God, to His providential and 
His moral administration, to the contents and 
45 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

the claim of Scripture, to the person and 
mediation of Christ, to the existence and min- 
istration of the Spirit, to the real nature of the 
Christian life, to conscience and duty, to the 
Church and her creeds and institutions, to the 
article of death, the state of the dead, future 
probation, a judgment to come, a final and 
retributive eternity. Men are everywhere test- 
ing these great verities of religion by their 
fears, their fancies, their hopes — by the dicta 
of their natural conscience, by the measure- 
ments of finite reason, by standards that are 
wholly subjective, individual, superficial, per- 
verted through sin; rather than by the lines 
and measurements of the Word and Spirit of 
God. In many instances they set up their little 
social consciousness against the consciousness 
of the whole Church — their temporary opinions 
against the enduring conviction of the house- 
hold of faith living on through the ages." 

All the speculations and experiments of be- 
nighted, ignorant, weak, deceivable men in 

4 6 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

their consummation — when they are ''finished," 
show that there are no substitutes for the Bible 
as to life's what or how, and no Bible but a 
divinely inspired and so reliable one ; and how- 
ever self-complacent for the time, rejecters of 
the Bible are and are seen to be traveling in 
the dark, running, as has been said of a fron- 
tier railroad, "from nowhere, through nowhere, 
to nowhere" ! 

But how read the indispensable Bible? In 
intelligent reasonableness. How read so that 
we may at once honor, understand and utilize 
it? As a little child and a straitened, eager 
child, in genuine humility, never allowing our 
ignorance to interfere with our knowledge, 
which is all the more reasonable because in life 
and death emergencies, we are called to seek 
the truth. There is a vast difference as to ani- 
mus, questioning criticism, and preliminary ex- 
actions of the business, between three men hunt- 
ing rabbits. One for the exhilarating fun of 
the chase, another from curiosity in animal 
47 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

anatomy, and the third who, hungry in the 
forest, is starving to death. Reason belongs 
often to ends — supreme practical ends — not 
logical self-gratifications. 

What is truly rational in Bible reception may 
be illustrated by four American children or- 
phaned in London through their father's sud- 
denly returning to New York. With reason 
in full play they argue : 

"Our father will surely write to us for our 
guidance. Having put us here he will not 
abandon us to the consequences of our own 
childhood, ignorance and experience.'' 

When letters come, they ask : "Are these 
really from father ? Probably they are, but are 
they surely, evidently so?" So they bring to 
bear their resources of scholarship and "criti- 
cism," examine the postmarks, many details of 
which they cannot understand, and the text, 
which varies indeed as pen, or typewriter or 
dictation are employed. And to their bright 
and rational, vet not omniscient minds, there are 

48 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

decided mysteries, not only of words, but also 
ideas — mercantile and diplomatic ideas above 
them and evidently designed to be reported 
rather than utilized. But the question is : 
"Was father the author of the letters?" And 
they rationally and confidently say : "Yes," 
and proceed accordingly, and find their critical 
faith confirmed by their experience; find that 
all their life needs, perplexities, enterprises, mu- 
tualities and prospects are here exactly met. 

Moreover their faith in the communications 
is additionally confirmed by the lucid and cheer- 
ing expositions of an intelligent, sympathetic 
and affectionate friend to whom the father 
cables in their behalf. 

Thoughtfully calculating that their father was 
sure to write, did write, and knew just what 
and how to write for their highest life experi- 
ences — though to be sure he did not always 
satisfy their curiosity — they thoughtfully read, 
and enjoy and utilize the letters. 

Not all of them, though. One was forsooth 
49 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

a young "liberal." He said he was his father's 

child, and equal to him in qualifications for 
revelations, vainly sought to induce the sym- 
pathizing friend to take counsel with him, in- 
dependently of the letters, said his own per- 
sonal authority was for truth higher and more 
"final'' than they, that he had "ideas and ideals," 
had "found himself" and could and would "un- 
waveringly pursue the truth wherever it led 
him," and spent much of his time in criticising 
and denouncing the letters — except as they 
were subordinate to his superior thought. Not 
long, however — going forth to test his unfilial 
theories by experience, he soon came to grief, 
now coldly ordered to "move on/' and then run 
over, and here in the lock-up and there in the 
river; day and night lost and lonely and hun- 
gry, in due time a sadder and wiser youth, 
he came to himself, returned home and in be- 
coming humility lived with the others a filial 
life of reason corrected by reason. 

One consideration never to be forgotten in 
50 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

our own Bible study is this : God has given 
universal notice that in His communications 
to men there will be always a zone of mystery 
between the voice and the ear — a zone of mys- 
tery to be in silent awe respected by the listener, 
always an intervening, an enchanted region be- 
tween the "burning bush" and the over-curious 
Moses "turning aside to see/' of which God in 
unapproachable majesty is saying : " Moses, 
Moses, draw not nigh hither, put off thy shoes 
from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou 
standest is holy ground !" 

God gives indeed wayside intimations of this 
in the very constitution of man himself, in which 
spiritual being mysteriously addressed by and 
through matter, mysteriously communicates 
purposes to matter. A music teacher's thought 
through his tongue to the pupil's ear and 
through the ear to the conceptions, and through 
the conceptions to the will, and through the 
will to the fingers, and from the fingers to the 
keys, is a familiar yet after all a startling mys- 
51 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

tery. So is telegraphic communication mysteri- 
ous. 

The mystery and reserve of God's communi- 
cations are true universally — appearing in na- 
ture and science as well as grace and truth — 
all through, in all spheres, from the guidance 
of the terrified and helpless wild fowl, crying 
in the blackness of a stormy November night 
yet sweeping forward with unerring certainty 
straight for the southern goal nevertheless, to 
the final "well done" and "enter the joy" of a 
departing Christian ! 

And of course there are mysterious elements 
in the contents and the delivery of Bible truth. 
It is usually said that God leaves to the sacred 
writers their peculiar characteristics of mind 
and disposition, and yet overrules them to in- 
sure inerrancy, and doubtless this is true. And 
it is also necessarily true that God must some- 
how have a verbal superintendence in Scrip- 
ture writing or none. This intervention of 
God in human diction in its impalpable mys- 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

teries is illustrated continually in Christian 
service. 

No sensitive and intelligent ambassador for 
Christ ever dares to preach or pray without 
heartfelt appeals to God to visit him, not only 
for the "meditations of his heart/' but the 
"words of his mouth," as well, and every Sab- 
bath night he thanks his Lord for words. But 
let him now blunder into talk about this sacred 
business of the "secret place of the Most High," 
and tell perhaps his wife all about it, and she 
will corner him on the spot, by asking if he 
imagines that his blundering infelicities are to 
be attributed to God. So in devout and spirit- 
ual conventions or prayer circles, Christian men 
and women pray for words as well as thoughts, 
feelings and purposes, and are sure that God 
regards such prayers, even though they might 
be cornered on the infelicities. "The wind 
bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the 
sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it 
cometh and whither it goeth : so is every one 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

that is born of the Spirit" — or taught or used 
of the Spirit. 

Another in this divine Trinity of efficacy is 
the Saviour — at once supreme objective and 
omnipotent source. 

"I am the way, the truth and the life," He 
said — "No man cometh unto the Father but 
by me" — as elsewhere, in thought, "No man 
goeth forth from the Father but by me" — or 
as Dr. Henry Van Dyke felicitously puts it : 
"Christ must be your door by whom you go into 
God, and out to man." 

Prof. Goldwin Smith is an accomplished bi- 
ographer, no doubt, but he can be improved 
upon. Of Gladstone he writes : "Let those 
who shrink with horror from the spread of 
free inquiry draw encouragement and charity 
at the same time from a grand example. Glad- 
stone, as Morley's life of him shows, was to 
the end of his days a High Churchman, in- 
tensely religious, a believer in special provi- 
dence, in the inspiration of Scripture, in the 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

efficacy of prayer. Yet he could not only as- 
sociate and act heartily with free thinkers, but 
look with satisfaction on the activity of the 
general conscience, and say that while there 
had never been an age so much perplexed with 
doubt, there had never been one so full of ear- 
nest pursuit of truth." Yes, and he was all 
that and more, too, in breadth and in depth, 
because as he himself says, "All I think, all I 
hope, all I write, all I live for, is based upon 
the divinity of Jesus Christ, the central joy of 
my poor wayward life." 

From his study window, for months, this 
writer has watched a magnificent tree, loftily 
towering above all its leafy, lower neighbors, 
with enchantment at once to resist and utilize 
the tempestuous gales, that fiercely buffet it 
from north and south and east and west — and 
in such fascinating exhibition of majesty and 
grace that at last, yielding to a psychological 
impulse, he visited it at close quarters to see its 
roots. Prof. Goldwin Smith, gazing all ad- 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

miringly on overtowering majesty on a higher 
plane, go thou and do the same ! 

If one may be allowed to quote from him- 
self: — If,as the Christian Work and Evangelist 

has suggested, discussing the present "most 
discouraging" lack of spirituality and power 
in the Churches, despite such confident predic- 
tions and various endeavors, we "arouse, wake 
up and turn on the searchlights," what will 
this wide-awake investigation almost certainly 
disclose? Will it not be seen that Christ as the 
"Head of all things to the Church" has been 
subordinated and displaced? Is not the "neg- 
lected Scriptural truth precisely adapted to 
the peculiar need of the times," of which Dr. 
Strong speaks, not, as he suggests, the truth 
of Jesus' social laws, but Jesus' personal and 
administrative supremacy? As to this, accord- 
ing to New Testament declarations, is not God 
peculiarly and forever insistent, and according 
to New Testament standards, are not we, at 

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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

this critical period of unparalleled demands an J 
opportunities, peculiarly delinquent? 

What is the New Testament representation 
in this respect? "Having humbled Himself 
and become obedient unto death, even the death 
of the Cross, God also hath highly exalted 
Him and given Him a name which is above 
every name." And he has supremely exalted 
him, it is to be ever remembered, not only 
absolutely for our ascriptions, but adminis- 
tratively for our surrender, our conformity, 
our "following" Him in all things within and 
without. And what is more, upon this exalta- 
tion of Christ all the moral forces of God's 
divine nature and all the executive forces of 
His divine government are concentrated, and 
for this unqualifiedly pledged. And we may 
be -ure that this, as a law of God for His chil- 
dren and His Church, is forever unchangeably 
imperative. 

Says Ruskin, "God will put up with a great 
many things in the human heart, but there is 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

one tiling lie will not put up with in it — a sec- 
ond place." Nor any more will He abate His 
heavenly, His parental zeal, and put up with 
a second place in the Church for Himself as 
represented by Christ. And whenever or 
wherever — and whatsoever their ecclesiastical 
or philosophical excuses — men or Churches 
have said, "We do not primarily care for a 
man, no matter what Christ is to him or he is 
to Christ," they have had, so far forth, to part 
with God. The purpose and prayer, "Lord, I 
will follow Thee, but suffer me first to enshrine 
my own or my forefather's controversial opin- 
ions," have never been accepted or tolerated 
of God. 

But how is this normal and imperative law 
to be interpreted, accepted, applied? The an- 
swer for saints is exactly in the injunction 
which saints, as to the Saviour, give to sin- 
ners : "Accept Christ at once and fully. Then, 
as surrendered to Him as the Head of all 
things, in faith and love and will, the Holy 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Spirit will at once inspire, and then answer your 
imploring cries for his ministries, and open to 
you the Scriptures, that you may believe them, 
and formulate them, and obey them, and pro- 
claim them. So shall you 'hear the voice of 
the Son of God' and live !" And to this corre- 
spond the theory and practice of the early 
Christians, and by this are explained their ex- 
alted holiness, their lofty intellectuality, and 
spiritual fellowships and worldwide conquests. 
Christ was to them not only, as they said, a 
''Saviour," but a "Prince" (the Arch-Leader). 
In their enthusiasm, alike as to what He was 
for their adoration, and in what He was to 
them in experience — as not only "All," but "in 
all" — no language can exaggerate their flam- 
ing passion of thought and heart for Christ 
in His God-appointed preeminence, nor their 
experiences and successes in consequence of it. 
Not since the days of the apostles to this year 
of 1903 is there on record the failure of a single 
man or Church undertaking life within or life 
59 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

upreaching - or life outreaching, by this plan 
of God. Christianity never faileth ; brut whether 
there be ecclesiasticism, it shall fail ; whether 
there be philosophies, they shall cease ; whether 
there be "standards," they shall vanish away. 
"All things" belong to the "body" as it is true 
to the "Head" ! Facts — facts are here. In 
fact, if taught of God, he has cried in adoring 
humility, "He must increase, but I must de- 
crease," "He is preferred before me," and in the 
all-satisfying ecstasies of faith and love : "This 
my joy, therefore, is fulfilled, to bear the Bride- 
groom's voice" — if he has gone up, awed but 
in the invited "boldness," before him to whom 
is "glory and dominion forever and ever," and 
when in love he laid his right hand upon him 
in the saying, "Fear not, I am the first and the 
last," believed it, and returning from his pray- 
ers, has lived it, whether he was John the Bap- 
tist, or John the Evangelist, or John Chrysos- 
tom, or John WyclifYe, or John Huss, or John 
Calvin, or John Knox, or John Bunyan, or 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

John Wesley, or John Hall, he was not only 
"conqueror and more than conqueror" in gen- 
eral, but so far forth, was by the Spirit of 
Truth guided into all truth, to know it, to 
love it, to feed upon it, to formulate it, to 
share it, to proclaim it. 

If the twentieth century Church does indeed 
"arouse herself, wake up, turn on the search- 
lights and engage in the work of rigid self- 
inspection" in the manifestation of God in 
Christ Jesus, can there be in any quarter the 
least doubt that to-day Christianity unqualified- 
ly accepted will be Christianity unlimited in 
power ? 

And here are briefer testimonies from higher 
authorities. Dr. Parkhurst : "We are not go- 
ing to reach Church unity by dropping, all of 
us, to the dead-level of doctrinal 'don't care,' 
but by rising to the positive altitude of mutual 
coherence in a loved and living Christ." 

Henry Ward Beecher (whose primal element 
of power all through was in his personal pas- 
61 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sion for a personal Christ) : "I bring this 
Christ to you this morning — my Master, whom 
I have proved, and who has given me victories 
innumerable; hopes that light clear forward to 
the grave; faith that reaches sheer across the 
abyss, and illumines the city beyond. That 
Saviour who has fulfilled to me a thousand 
times His promises in sickness, in poverty in 
former days, in cares, in fears, in anxieties, in 
self-condemnations, in aspirations — that Sa- 
viour of whom I can say, T know that my Re- 
deemer liveth' — I bring Him to you."' 

Dr. William H. Furness, Unitarian of Phila- 
delphia ; "I flee to Christ as to a rock amid 
. storm-tossed billows, and find in him a founda- 
tion for Faith in God and for Hope for man — 
a foundation which neither the dismaying 
speculations of science, nor the unsolved mys- 
teries of Being can disturb." 

George James Romanes ; " Science is mov- 
ing with all the force of a tidal-wave toward 
faith in Jesus Christ as the world's Saviour." 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Dr. David Gregg : "My fellowmen, give the 
Church a man with a Christocentric creed, and 
you give it a man who will keep the pulpit from 
becoming archaic, and who will make it a lead- 
ing power in the world. He will be a man with 
an effective creed." 

Prof. Tholuck : "From the age of seventeen 
I have always asked myself, 'What is the chief 
end of man's life ?' I could never persuade my- 
self that the acquisition of knowledge was the 
end. Just then God brought me into contact 
with a venerable saint who lived in fellowship 
with Christ, and from that time I have had but 
one passion, and that is Christ and Christ 
alone." 

Robert B. Buckham : "It is to Him that all 
past ages and history itself has been pointing 
with an unmistakable hand; the Old Testament 
of the Bible is but the prophecy of His com- 
ing; and without Him it is worthless; the New 
Testament is the fulfillment of the Old in Him.. 
His character, His personality, His humanity, 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

His divinity, He Himself, is the great central 
figure of all time, and nothing can dim the un- 
fading beauty of His image, or remove the 
gracious remembrance of Him from the mem- 
ory of man. It is Christ that has won the heart 
of mankind, and not His precious works and 
priceless precepts solely. It is upon Christ that 
our hope and trust for the future are staid, not 
upon the observance of any law or custom, no 
matter how excellent. Sun, moon and stars 
may be forgot, but never the crucified Saviour 
of man kind." 

Dr. Samuel T. Spear (formerly editor of the 
Independent, and conspicuously "strong" rather 
than sentimental, in a farewell address to the 
Presbytery of Brooklyn) : "Two years ago I 
lost my wife, who for half a century had been 
as good a wife as ever a man loved and lost. 
One year ago I lost my only daughter, who 
cared for my declining years; and five months 
ago I lost my only son, and I was left a com- 
plete wreck in my family and social life. Be- 

6 4 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sides, in the same period I have had two at- 
tacks of typhoid fever, the last one confining 
me to my room for three months, and from 
which I never hoped to recover. In all this 
sorrow I have been led to study the Bible as 
never before, and especially all it says of Christ, 
and my soul has received such a vision of 
Christ as I had no idea of before. All the am- 
biguities and dubiosities about Him, which 
trouble many church members and some minis- 
ters, have been cleared away. Christ is to me 
as clear an object of thought, of faith, of af- 
fection, and a Being to be served as a personal 
friend, as plain to me as you, Brother Foote 
(pointing to the Rev. Mr. Foote, in the front 
pew). I lie down with Him, I rise up with 
Him, I sleep with Him by my side, I walk 
with Him, I know Him as I never knew r Him 
before and as I never should have known Him 
but for this terrible crucifixion of affliction." 

Dr. Burdett Hart : "St. Paul aggrandized 
Christ. By a fiery eloquence that tamed heathen 

65 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

mobs and charmed cultured assemblies ; by an 
impassioned zeal that despised danger, that 
counted all things loss, that he might gain glory 
for Him whom he served ; that threw away 
gems as though they were baubles, gems of 
fame and learning and proud life and wealth ;by 
a courage that made him calm and self-poised 
before Agrippas and Caasars, and bore him 
through storms of the elements and storms of 
infuriated enemies, as though all were smooth 
and serene ; by a loving and loyal devotion that 
fused every faculty in its white heat, and ab- 
sorbed every possession in its burning endeavor, 
he placed that Name on high, and bore it over 
seas and land, and proclaimed to men of every 
speech, to refined Greek and rude barbarian 
and conquering Roman, their common debt to 
one divine Redeemer. He knew T no other name. 
His loyalty had but one supreme object, to 
make Christ great in the world, to aggrandize 
Him everywhere; he cared for nothing else, he 
lived for nothing else, and he would die for 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

nothing else. As always, so now also, Christ 
shall be magnified in my body, whether by life 
or by death. Who is there of us who stands 
with St. Paul in this ? As the recording angels 
make entries on the great books of God, what 
do they find to be true of ycfur life and mine? 
Has Christ been supreme with us in our 
thoughts, in our purposes, in our affections, in 
our work?" 

The third consideration for the realization 
of apostolic Christianity in the twentieth cen- 
tury, is in a due regard for God's Holy Spirit — 
alike for personal experience, and the polariza- 
tion, organization, unity, purity and efficiency 
of the Church. Practically the one supreme 
question of the Christian and the Church to- 
day is : What are the conditions of the Holy 
Spirit's characteristic efficiency? 

And first, His efficiency is indispensable. Dr. 
Alexander Maclaren, of Manchester, in an in- 
spired and inspiring address at Edinburgh, on 
the true ''Evangelical Mysticism," says that, 

6 7 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

"Its controlling principle is not only evan- 
gelical, but central to all truest and highest 
Christian faiths and life," that it may be de- 
fined as "the direct union and communion of 
the Spirit of God and the spirit of man," that 
the doctrine of the New Testament on this sub- 
ject is unmistakable, and is embraced in three 
particulars : First, the imparting of the divine 
life to the believer by the Spirit in regenera- 
tion ; second, the indwelling of the Spirit of life 
in the believer for sanctification and assimilation 
to God ; and third, the outworking of the Spirit 
through the believer, for a new manifestation 
of God to man. 

Dr. Maclaren argues that for all these life 
results, the Holy Spirit's ministries are indis- 
pensable. As a reviewer sums it up, "Here is 
the corrective alike of ritualism and rational- 
ism. We shall learn that all true worship is 
spiritual, not formal, and that faith recognizes 
truths and facts that reason cannot demon- 
strate. We shall learn that spiritual criticism 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

is the antidote to all excesses of literary or his- 
torical criticism, and rest in a persuasion of 
Scriptural authority that is born of the Spirit's 
inward witness." Then, "What a grand effect 
on ethics ! The secret of the highest morality 
is spirituality. Whosoever abideth in Him sin- 
neth not. Nothing makes sin so abhorrent as 
the inward revelation of a holy God indwelling 
and making the body his own temple." Fur- 
thermore, "What high motives inspire the life 
under such conditions ! What indifference to 
mere salary, human applause, worldly ambition, 
scholarly distinction, when the being is per- 
vaded with God's presence!" 

As there is "none other name under heaven 
given among men whereby we must be saved" 
than the name of the crucified Jesus Christ of 
Nazareth, so there is none other power under 
heaven given among men whereby we must be 
regenerated, sanctified, restrained, impelled. 
There is in all the universe no skilful hand but 
that of the divine Spirit of Holiness, which can 

6 9 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

restring and tune the broken "lute within" and 
then — to allure the lost and wandering, charm 
the weary and hopeless, thrill the worker and 
warrior — play it. 

Dr. Ambrose Shepherd, of Glasgow, first 
asks why it is that with so much machinery and 
activity in the Churches, there is such deplor- 
able lack of spiritual results — and then an- 
swers, "The reason why so much of the prayer, 
toil and sacrifice of the Christian Church counts 
for little or nothing, is because so many of us 
are living on the wrong side of Pentecost. 
Many of us know Christ; many of us are fol- 
lowing Christ; but how many of us have 
claimed our own Pentecost, or have sought at 
Christ's hands that equipment for service with- 
out which all other equipment counts for noth- 
ing — that Holy Spirit of God in the heart — 
that vital living power which is to the Chris- 
tian what genius is to the artist, and without 
which, whatever his technique, there is no soul? 
Our clamant need is the fulness of the Spirit. 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

For what harder work can there be in the 
world than to get spiritual work out of an un- 
spiritual Christian?" 

"Out of an unspiritual Christian" — yes, and 
as an editorial in the Xew York Tribune shows 
— he had best not try. First, argues this secu- 
lar authority, the Holy Spirit to the human 
spirit, and then operations ! 

"Whitefield," it says, "who a hundred and 
fifty years ago began this preaching in the open 
air, had a message to speak; it tore his soul 
and would not be quiet. When a church was 
denied him, he went to the fields. 'My Lord,' 
he cried, 'had the mountains for His pulpit and 
the heavens for His sounding-board ; He sent 
his servants into the highways and hedges.' He 
was surrounded by thousands — peeresses in 
their coaches; old scholars from the seclusion 
of the colleges ; 'the poor colliers came from out 
of their coalpits in swarms, the tears making 
white gutters down their black faces.' The 
sound of their voices, praising God, was heard 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

afar off like the thunder of the sea. In those 
days, as on that of Pentecost, thousands were 
converted unto God. Why do we see nothing 
like this scene in our modern camp meetings? 
There are souls crying out to he saved in New 
Jersey as there were in Spitalfields. Life is as 
awful in its import, death as near, and the 
Helper, the only Helper, as ready to stretch out 
His hand. What is wanting? It does not seem 
to us, outside secular observers, that it is a 
Whitefield, but Whitefield's spirit that is lack- 
ing. Secular observers and secular newspapers 
are entitled to speak in this matter. When any 
movement is made which offers to lift us all into 
a higher life, those whom it offers to help have 
the right to judge it, and to decide whether it 
does its work or not. If men profess to make 
Christ and His gospel more honorable in the 
world, we warn them that they need White- 
field's spirit. Whitefield was a man possessed 
with his message. . . . The voice of one 
man thoroughly on fire with love for his Mas- 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ter would pass through this conventional ma- 
chinery, like an electric shock through lifeless 
matter. Christians who set going this mechan- 
ical enginery may be mistaken as to the reality 
of their own zeal ; but the world is never mis- 
taken. The world cries no longer 'Lo, here is 
Christ/ or 'Lo, He is there.' It begins to doubt 
if He is anywhere. To such of our readers as 
mean to show Him this month, we urge that 
they make ready not by writing a fine sermon 
or preparing cold meats, but by betaking them- 
selves to their knees humbly to find out whether 
they themselves know Him. Afterward, un- 
less He has given them a message to the world, 
let them keep silent. Let us have no sermons 
and prayers in these camp meetings, that come 
not from the heart. We can talk politics or 
sing Pinafore with the brain and mouth; but 
it is only when the soul itself speaks that we 
should try to teach God to others." 

Men are saying, "The Church is weak be- 
cause of worldliness, materialism. Sabbath 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

desecration, feeble preaching, diminished at- 
tendance." The truth is the Church is never 
weak from any enmity or disability or disad- 
vantage without. The Church and the pulpit 
are always weak, and fatally delusive as well, 
in the absence of the Holy Spirit within. 

And not only altogether essential, but alto- 
gether adequate, are the ministries of the Holy 
Spirit. Not a debased and obdurate sinner, not 
a degenerated, lean, lifeless Christian, but can 
by the omnipotent Spirit be "made meet for 
the inheritance of the saints in light" and for 
the society and service of God, on the way to it. 
There is no benighted soul in any possible dark- 
ness, without, within, but His light, His all per- 
vading, all penetrating light, will thoroughly il- 
luminate it. Earth hath no sorrows that He 
cannot heal, no adversities that He cannot re- 
verse. 

"I shall be satisfied," cried the Psalmist, 
"when I awake in thy likeness," and there is 
no spiritual slumberer but the Holy Spirit can 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

even now and here awake him, mold him to 
the divine likeness, and satisfy him for this 
life. 

Moreover, He can adjust us to each other 
and give unity. Says Bishop A. Cleveland 
Coxe : "To illustrate *my ruling ideas, viz. : 
First — We must drop all references to Episco- 
palians, Presbyterians, Methodists, etc., in our 
meetings, and look on each other simply as 
fellow Christians. Second — The Holy Spirit 
will reconstruct when we thus come down to 
elemental relations. He only can give organic 
unity." He only can, but He can, banish from 
hearts and organizations the prepossessions 
and prejudices, that preclude organized Chris- 
tianity. 

And then He can bring the Christian and 
the Church at any period into line, into har- 
mony with the changing spirit of the times. 
Bishop Wescott was right — "The voice of the 
Spirit will come to each new generation, as it 
has come in past times, through the circum- 
75 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

stances of the age in which it becomes articu- 
late." 

Fairly invoked, the Holy Spirit of God never 
fails, never disappoints. 

But what are the conditions of the Holy 
Spirit's efficacy — over" us, within us, through 
us? "There are none," is the answer often 
given, and in circles highly orthodox, too — an 
answer in which is concealed the most per- 
nicious heresy of Christendom. 

"Ever since Pentecost the Holy Spirit's in- 
fluences are like an atmosphere all about a 
Christian and a Church — and you do not have 
to pray for them," it is said, and so the deadly 
notion goes abroad, that so long as one is a 
Christian — no matter how neglectful of prayer, 
or thought, or work, or God, or man, or self — 
all is well because the graces and operations of 
the all-sufficient Spirit of God are for us in- 
sured in any event ; and, so, many of the "very 
elect" are stealthily deceived into the most de- 
plorable indolence and presumption. 

7 6 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Of course we do not have to pray for the 
Pentecostal descent of the Holy Spirit again, 
neither does a Christian have to pray to be 
adopted. But the law of God, announced in 
His Word, and all history, and all experience, 
is, that for His child to have the heavenly gifts 
of sonship, he must pray, and this whether he 
can understand the reasons for and the philoso- 
phy of the divine arrangement or not, and in 
fact only those who do importunately ask in 
prayer and supplication, do abundantly and ade- 
quately receive. The same is true of the per- 
sonal operations of the Holy Spirit. These, in 
fact, are conditioned upon the importunate 
prayer of faith and energy — as declared in the 
word of God, with universal ratification in the 
providence of God. One of the most lamentable 
exhibitions of confusion of spiritual thought 
and sentiment, where there should have been 
only the most radiant certainty, appeared in 
this respect in some of the recent revival serv- 
ices. Listening penetratingly you would hear, 
77 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

"Of course you must all earnestly pray; 
'Prayer moves the arm that moves the world' ; 
no work of grace obtains without much 
prayer" ; and then in an "aside" undertone, 
"And yet this is the dispensation of Pentecost 
and of course He is and will be with us — there 
is no need to pray for the Holy Spirit." 

Now the propriety, necessity and success of 
supplications for the gifts and operations of 
the Holy Spirit have been recognized by saints 
of power all down the centuries, from the 
Apostle Paul to Charles Hodge and Evan 
Roberts. Says Dr. Hodge in his incomparable 
lectures : "Hence the prayers so frequent in 
Scripture, and so constantly on the lips of 
believers, that the Spirit would not cast us off, 
would not give us up, would not be grieved by 
our ingratitude or resistance, but that He would 
come to us, enlighten us, purify, elevate, 
strengthen, guide and comfort us ; that He 
would come to our households, renew our chil- 
dren, visit our churches and multiply his con- 

78 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

verts, as the drops of the morning dew, and that 
He would everywhere give the Word of God 
effect." Discussing the erroneous idea that the 
Word has inherent power, he writes : "It is 
inconsistent with the command to pray for the 
Spirit. Men are not accustomed to pray that 
God would give fire the power to burn or ice to 
cool. If the Spirit were always in mystical, 
indissoluble union with the Word, giving it 
inherent divine power, there would be no pro- 
priety in praying for His influence, as the 
apostles did, and as the Church in all ages has 
ever done and continues to do." 

And this of Evan Roberts : "He tells the 
people frankly that they must pray for the 
presence of the Holy Spirit — that they do not 
need him"; and again quoting him: "For five 
months before the revival began, I had prayed 
agonizingly for the Holy Spirit. Each day I 
spent from three to eight hours in prayer. Be- 
fore that I had been a sound sleeper ; but begin- 
ning in May, 1904, I awoke at one o'clock each 
79 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

night, and prayed sometimes until four A. M. 
and sometimes until nine A. M." (However, it 
is to be remarked, a normal and genuinely in- 
tense importunity does not constrain a man to 
rush hysterically into nervous prostration.) 

Yes, definite prayers for the Holy Spirit's 
ministries are appropriate — and more, most 
urgently demanded. 

Considering the practical importance of 
prayer and the representative office and posi- 
tion of the ministry in its relation to the gen- 
eral field of spiritual operations, it may in a 
sense be truly said that the hope of the Church 
and world is referred to the simple question: 
"What is the average minister in his study at 
eight or nine o'clock A. M. doing — what is he 
preferring?" Look at him ; what an interesting 
objective for urgent applications he is ! 

Here is an illustration in the general prose- 
cution of Church activities : "Work for the 
Kingdom in our own Church" — five distinct 
objects. "Work for the Kingdom in our com- 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

munity" — six objects. "Work for the King- 
dom as organized by our denomination" — 
seven objects. "Work for the Kingdom in gen- 
eral" — thirty objects. Several years ago at 
Andover, the calls upon the future ministers, 
as to social economics alone, were formulated 
under the divisions of "The Social Evolution 
of Labor," "The Treatment of Crime and the 
Criminal Class," "Pauperism and Disease," 
with twelve urgently important topics under 
each division. Then pastoral cares and calls, 
family and household engagements, the claims 
of general literature, then general pulpit prepa- 
ration — then special pulpit preparation — all 
plausible, legitimate, exciting applications. And 
may he, can he, must he resist them all? For 
his life — his life personal and as before 
God and before men — he must resist them all, 
until the personal call of his God and his 
Saviour is first of all and fully regarded, alike 
as to time and thought ! The secret of his life, 
in the holiness of it, and joy of it, and the 
81 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

power of it, is, in fact, hidden in his deafness 
and blindness to anybody and anything, until 
the voice and vision of his God are fully re- 
garded. At the beginning of the day, one of 
the alternatives for our choice is the intimate 
personal fellowship of God Himself, with the 
love of God shed abroad in our hearts, the light 
of God irradiating our intellects, the power of 
God transforming from the image of the earth- 
ly to the image of the heavenly, thought, af- 
fection and will — all these, not as in a celestial 
and transitory experience only, but to be clear- 
ly and effectively and permanently manifested, 
on our return to earth. 

As all concede in theory, and few realize in 
experience, the combined duty and privilege — 
the wisdom of the minister in his study is here : 
Duly emancipated, first of all, to surrender un- 
conditionally to the Holy Spirit to be by Him 
in thought and heart taken up to heaven to 
stay there — until Christ Himself — after His 
personal society has been, in the opportunities 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and bliss of it, in appropriate fulness duly en- 
joyed — until Christ Himself pronounces upon 
him the dismissal benediction of his return. 

"I look back with horror upon my neglect of 
secret prayer," writes Norman McLeod. "I 
wish I had prayed more," with demure pathos 
murmured a servant of God, as dying gave him 
a mountain-top view of life — voicing the re- 
gretting thought of ten thousands, who living 
or dying, have gained at last a height from 
which the office and power of prayer are re- 
alized in heaven's light. 

Says Austin Phelps — what everybody knows 
but everybody easily forgets : "No large 
growth in holiness was ever gained by one who 
did not take time to be often and long alone 
with God.'' Yes, and "no large growth in 
holiness," from "being often and long alone 
with God," was ever gained without the most 
determined and indeed heroic struggles to at- 
tain it. 

It seems the easiest thing in the world, for 

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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

a Christian, having shut to his door, to pray, 
but in truth we all do "believe" Coleridge when 
he says : "Believe me, to pray with all your 
heart and strength, with the reason and the 
will ; this is the last, the greatest achievement 
of a Christian's warfare on earth." And this 
is all the more remarkable because prayer be- 
longs, not only to a man's heaven-reaching re- 
lation, and the promises of God, but to his 
own subjective nature. 

To quote Dr. Theodore B. Hyslop : "As an 
alienist and one whose whole life has been 
concerned with the sufferings of the mind, I 
would state that of all hygienic measures to 
counteract disturbed sleep, depressed spirits and 
all the miserable sequels of a distressed mind, 
I would undoubtedly give the first place to 
the simple habit of prayer. Such a habit does 
more to clean the spirit and strengthen the 
soul, to overcome mere incidental emotional- 
ism, than any other therapeutic agent known 
to me." 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Two or three years ago, in certain circles 
of evangelistic effort, it was quite the fashion 
to quote the story of a German professor, cele- 
brated for his prayers, and of the surprise of 
certain students who had slyly arranged to 
overhear him, when in weariness at a late hour, 
he closed his book, he simply said : "Good- 
night, Lord — on the same old terms !" and went 
to bed. From which it was, in effect, argued 
that we need not be specially concerned about 
our prayers, because God would surely "do 
His part,'' and hear and answer "any old 
prayers." 

If, however, the professor was indeed a man 
of extraordinary habits in genuine prayer, he 
could indeed appeal to the gracious and kind- 
ly Master in the weariness of an emergency of 
faithful service, and say, "Good-night, Lord — 
on the same old terms"; but only as in the 
freshness and liberty of the early hours he 
had habitually and enthusiastically preferred 
Christ's society to his own solitude, with much 

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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

of time and concentration of thought devoted 
to the preference. 

The gifts of Christ and the ministries of the 
Holy Spirit are never cheap. In this, too. God 
having offered Himself, will not take a "second 
place." Moreover, since the law of life and 
of God demand emphasized prayer at what- 
ever apparent sacrifice, it is a comfort to re- 
member that while thus "absent from the body" 
to be "present with the Lord," the Lord Him- 
self will surely take care of the neglected in- 
terests. He sendeth "none a warfare any time 
at his own charges." He calleth and detain- 
eth none any time at his own charges. 

When called by the Prophet to turn his back 
upon the subsidy which he had already paid 
over to the proscribed Israelites, Amaziah, king 
of Judah, bewails : "But what shall we do for 
the hundred talents which I have given to the 
army of Israel?" To which the man of God 
replies : "The Lord is able to give thee much 
more than this." And He was. And the God 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

of Israel having opened the Throne of Grace 
and ordained prayer, is able to countervail any 
disadvantages incurred by His servant, His 
child, in his steadfast purpose to intently "see 
His face," and so returning, to "serve Him." 

Prof. Pritchard, of Oxford, asked if science 
and scientific thinking tended to unsettle re- 
ligious faith and devotion, replied : "It is pre- 
occupation of mind rather than science that is 
and always has been the prolific parent of 
scepticism and religious indifference/' Yes, 
science and criticisms and "new thought'' may 
have slain their "thousands," but the "preoccu- 
pation of mind" which for the ministers and 
others has precluded the appointed prayers, has 
slain its "ten thousands." 

The condition of the Holy Spirit's control- 
ling and sanctifying visitations — and hence the 
condition of due practical regard for the Word 
and the Christ, is in emphasized prayer, as in 
fact it is also for the heroism which is to ac- 
company and flow from the three-fold theism. 

87 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

But what of the heroism? It is never to he 
forgotten that no religion of the head or of the 
heart can he acceptable to God or valuable to 
man, unless it reaches and actuates the hand. 
No true saint can be an idler. In the highest 
sense it is true that the Christian has got to 
"work for a living." New Testament Chris- 
tianity, in the graces of it, the joy of it, the 
triumphs of it, depends upon activity — yes, and 
heroic activity. Here is indeed the heroism of 
noblest achievement, from highest motives — 
Godward, manward, inward — with most un- 
selfish devotion and untiring exertions. 

When a man enlists in the service of the 
Police or Fire Department of a large city, or 
in his country's army or navy, it is always with 
the understanding, that if occasion require, he 
shall exhibit himself in downright heroism. 
The same is true of enlistment in the cause — 
the Kingdom of God, with the additional speci- 
fication that "occasion will surely, regularly 
require" ; but with this unspeakable consolation, 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

too, that in his experience, the theism will care 
for the heroism ! In all the activities of the 
New Testament Christian; God in His Word 
will enlighten; God in Christ will inspire; God 
in the Holy Spirit will perform; and always, 
first and last, God will unfailingly reward ! 

Reference has already been made to the sep- 
arate efficiency of the separate means. But the 
theism and heroism, duly combined, give in 
every case the most transcendent and ever 
gratifying and unfailing results of an entire 
Christianity — in literally "Good tidings of 
great joy which shall be to all people." 

From the first century to the twentieth, no 
Christian whose mind has glowed, and whose 
heart has burned within him, from the Word 
of Christ, received in adoring worship of 
Christ, with filial longings and importunate ap- 
plications for the Holy Spirit, to make him true 
to Christ, with heroic consecration to Christ — 
no real Christian has ever failed in happiness or 
holiness or mission or hopes, be he layman or 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

minister or missionary — living or dying, antici- 
pating the "unseen world," embarking for the 
"unseen world." Moreover, no aggregation of 
such men in Church or society has ever failed 
in respect of unity of purpose, or harmony of 
opinion, or brotherly love, or the prosecution 
of the corporate enterprises, or the realization 
of the common aims. 

In view of all this, is it not evident that the 
sectarian who wilfully overloads the Church, 
the "Body of Christ," and the rationalist who 
devitalizes it, are equally an astonishment, if 
not an offence before earth and heaven at 
once ? 

The boasting of the denominationalist is 
usually the exultation of a fat man over a 
dead man — confusing his fat with his vitality ; 
or of the lunatic who mistakes his excrescence 
for his heart, and cherishes the one and neglects 
the other. Mr. Beecher used to pour out his 
denunciations upon any person or institution 
that "stood between a man and his oppor- 
90 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

tunity." His resurrection and return are now 
in order that he may, with characteristic elo- 
quence and power, arraign the denominational- 
ists who stand between men and communities 
and their Christianity, in the apostolic emanci- 
pation and fulness of it. 

And here are the liberals, with lance and 
sabre, prancing up and down the glad — the 
vernal premises of a full and eternally trium- 
phant Christianity, spearing and slashing away 
at the saints, under the banners of sociology 
and ethics, blind to the Christianity which has 
supreme ethics and sociology and "all things" 
beside. 

"We are living to-day in the midst of a great 
dissolution," cries Dr. Crapsey — net particu- 
larly as a mourner, however, and apparently 
more in exultation than tears. "We are living 
to-day in the midst of great dissolution. We 
are standing by the death-bed of a great re- 
ligion." If this is one of the great denomina- 
tions that he is talking about, as in extremis, 
9i 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

very well ; but Dr. Crapsey cannot point to a 
single fact or factor of Christianity, which, in 
so far as it is Christian, indicates any single 
asj ect of debility — not to say death. The New 
Testament Christianity has not only power for 
all performance, but all emergencies — vitality 
for functions and for perpetuity. It is like its 
reigning Source and Objective ; in omnipotence 
"the same yesterday, to-day and forever." 

Moreover, this New Testament plan in its 
sufficiency will provide in due fulness and due 
limitation, too, for ''doctrine," and "creed," the 
expression of doctrine. No sane man ever cries 
out against plan for performance, architecture 
for construction, quadration for navigation, 
science for prescription, or philosophy for dis- 
covery; and no thoughtful — no "scientific" 
man in the field of religion cries out against 
"theology," "creed," "doctrine." Yet as a pos- 
sibility and indeed as a deplorable certainty the 
Churches may and do have delusive and mis- 
chievous superfluity of creed. 
92 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

To stand for doctrine formulated for life is 
scriptural and rational. To fight over doc- 
trines born of hereditary notions is madness. 
That there is such madness, not of a mild form, 
not readily yielding* to treatment and not hid 
in a corner, everybody knows. 

The practical adequacy of the New Testa- 
ment conceptions, for not only code but creed, 
not only duty but doctrine, is continually il- 
lustrated. A few years ago, the Sunday School 
Times, while edited by Henry Clay Trumbull, 
and very clearly and very nearly exhibiting a 
New Testament Christianity, gave a novel and 
striking illustration of this. In commenting on 
"The determinate counsel and foreknowledge 
of God," and "To do whatsoever thy hand 
and thy counsel determined before to be done" 
— of the Acts, the Times drew the sharp criti- 
cism of the former editor of the Christian Ad- 
vocate for its Calvinism. Whereupon the 
Times quoted from various Methodist com- 
mentators on the same lesson — and behold, they 
93 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

were more Calvinistic than he had been. As 
the Methodist narrator of the story remarked, 
"There's where he had US." 

Christianity can take care of its creeds with- 
out any help from the denominations. 

Furthermore, these New Testament Ends 
and Means give the only basis for Christian or 
Church unity. The various "Federations" 
have remaining in them the seeds of inevitable 
ultimate disagreement. The elements in the 
denominations which keep them from organic 
unity will keep them from harmony and effi- 
ciency in Federation unity. There is, in fact, 
for Christians no unity worthy of the name 
but unity in and from and for Christ Jesus. 
Heaven will not endorse any other, earth will 
not accept any other, the Churches cannot 
realize any other. 

Just now the various Churches are furnish- 
ing for those who have eyes to see, a graphic 
illustration of all this. The grand projects for 
Church union in Canada have halted. The 
94 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

union of Congregationalists, Methodist Protes- 
tant and United Brethren is recommended by 
committees, but from the determined opposi- 
tion of prominent Congregational pastors and 
Churches is evidently hopeless. 

The Presbyterianism of the nation presents 
an awkward and painful spectacle of here, re- 
pudiation of all union, and there, sharp dissen- 
tions in consequence of union, and grave doubts 
of the practical results of union already con- 
summated. 

The one plan of Christian unity is already 
partially on exhibition in the Young Men's 
Christian Associations. There is not an ec- 
clesiastical establishment on the face of the 
earth that can for a moment compare with these 
in this respect, and for the reason that in 
spirit, and approximately in organization, they 
are Christian and not sectarian. 

And now, what in this twentieth century is 
the New Testament Christianity waiting for 
but this — definite organization? 
95 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

\V) enterprise in the interest of a unique and 
urgent cause which has principles to be advo- 
cated and applied, a message to be delivered, 
forces to be made effective, a creed to be assimi- 
lated for life, can be prosecuted without spe- 
cific organization. Moreover the organization 
must be most discriminatingly and sharply cen- 
tralized in a very few essential particulars. 
With the notorious limitations of human time 
and thought and energy and temper and re- 
sources, no organization can accommodate 
many factors or any idiosyncrasies. 

But is it said the formulations here will be 
difficult? Not very. It may take time. 
"Everything takes ten years," Abram S. Hewitt 
declares, and this reform may take ten years — 
but it is entirely feasible. A thousand voices 
protest. "Church union is desirable but not 
feasible." Oh, yes, it is feasible. For one 
thing, "it is in the air." Dr. U. S. Bartz 
writes : "Happily it is no longer necessary to 
try to prove that organic Church union is con- 

9 6 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sonant with the will of Christ. If anybody 
doubts it, he must be a pessimist indeed as to 
the progress of the Spirit's influence upon the 
Body of Christ. Church union is so much 'in 
the air' that the religious atmosphere must be 
considered either highly salutary or woefully 
noxious." 

Let the Christian men and women who burn 
with Bible zeal for God and men, first take an 
airing up and down lower Broadway and Wall 
Street, and watch radically differing men co- 
operating with tremendous energy and trium- 
phant successes in organizations strictly trimmed 
to ends and means. Then let them take a keen 
look at the Young Men's Christian Associations, 
at home and abroad ; then Northfield ; then the 
Moody Church at Chicago; then the Honolulu 
Union Church ; then the Messrs. Keigwin, 
Baragwanath and Hartley, in union services 
in New York. 

What means it indeed that pastors, Presby- 
terian, Methodist and Baptist, with their 
97 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Church officers and members, in the very heart 
of wide-awake and positive New York, in 
Christian fellowship and cooperation, unite in 
everything pertaining to the New Testament 
faith — Bible knowledge, deeper spiritual life, 
salvation of the lost, purification and uplift of 
the community, celebration of the Lord's Sup- 
per — everything? 

It means that what "man has done" tem- 
porarily and locally and despite denominational 
embarrassments, "man may do" permanently 
and extensively and in the full "liberty of the 
children of God," boundlessly. 

And what means this record of the Central 
Union Church of Honolulu to which was called 
several years ago, Rev. William M. Kincaid, 
a Presbyterian of Minneapolis? "It is an 
unique religious body, possibly the only one. 
of its kind in the world. It is founded upon 
the most liberal basis, five simple facts form- 
ing its creed. It owes allegiance to ro de- 
nomination or sect, but is an organization by 
98 ..-■•:_• 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

itself. Among its members are included fami- 
lies from the Methodist, Baptist and Presby- 
terian Churches. It is the oldest and largest 
church in the Hawaiian Islands, and, in fact, 
has founded nearly all the other churches there. 
In its membership are included five hundred 
families, practically all the English-speaking 
people in Honolulu, and all the Government 
officers. 

The church is a remarkably strong and ag- 
gressive body. Mr. Kincaid says that its or- 
ganization is the best that he has ever known. 
A new church building, with a seating capacity 
of two thousand, has recently been completed 
at a cost of $130,000, all of which has been 
paid. The church is free from debt. An idea 
of its strength and liberal policy may be gained 
from the fact that in the last year $9,000 was 
raised for the expenses of the parish and $30,- 
000 for charitable and mission work. 

The Central Union Church owns a steamer, 
which goes out every year to the Caroline and 

UOFC. " 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Philippine Islands and among the other islands 
of the Hawaiian group, carrying missionaries 
and supplies for the work in those islands. A 
large number of missionary workers are en- 
tirely supported by this church." 

It means that at home and abroad in the 
sanctified wisdom of men delivered at last from 
the "malignancy of a false perspective," and 
the ever reconstructing energy of the God of 
the New Testament, the "Dream of the dreamer 
who dreams that he dreams" will soon be a 
twentieth century reality, with ecclesiasticism 
and denominationalism, in the fires of God, 
first dissolved and then crystalized, to reappear 
in the consummate composition of Organized 
Christianity ! 



IOO 



CHAPTER III 

But what are the special hindrances which 
in the past have precluded and in the present 
delay the realization of organized Christianity? 

To which the answer is, the three Prides — 
Pride of Rationalism, Denominational Pride 
of Ecclesiastical Power, and Denominational 
Pride of Creed Opinion. 

The Pride of Rationalism has obtruded it- 
self upon the Church in all its history, and 
now as always, invoking discoveries and con- 
jectures of science — often falsely so called — 
and the results of critical studies usually de- 
structive, is set to minify that which is heavenly 
and divine, and magnify that which is earthly 
and human. Just now it boasts great things on 
the basis of ever fluctuating scientific and critical 
conclusions, and meanwhile is hard to define and 

IOI 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

discuss, because under various tokens of "Liber- 
als." "New Theology," "The Scientific Meth- 
od," "New Thought," etc., its disciples take 
rank all the way from pantheism or atheism 
acr< >ss to the gates of orthodoxy. 

This, however, may be said of it : it utterly 
fails to ''make good." 

This is true even of a reasoning intellectu- 
ality, to which with this variegated cult, every- 
thing is ultimately referred. 

The liberal ranks number, no doubt, scholar- 
ly and eloquent men, but for us and our house, 
give us still in preference, for pure reason- 
ing intellectuality, Thomas Chalmers, Charles 
Hodge, Richard S. Storrs, William E. Glad- 
stone, Charles Parkhurst, Joseph Cook, and a 
kindred host. 

Then the poetic sentimentality on the throne 
of thought and reason! 

Take the factor of sin as in man and society 
and before God. "Pools make a mock at sin." 
These wise men ignore it — as God has por- 
102 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

trayed and man in fact knows it, outside and 
inside. They sentimentally call it "a misfor- 
tune or disease, or a necessary condition of at- 
taining perfection — a fall forward," while uni- 
versal facts overwhelmingly confirm the Bible 
representation of its hateful vileness, its leprous 
meanness, and reason as well as Scripture, de- 
clares that if at all God be God in holiness and 
ideals, it must be supremely abhorrent to Him. 
Furthermore in the way of relief from it, rea- 
son coincides with Scripture and through Wil- 
helm Herrman, for example (who, "in obsti- 
nate rationality, is a master in logic and phi- 
losophy, and deals with realities and not with 
words"), declares : "It is quite right that men 
are unwilling to let go the thought that redemp- 
tion has been won by the vicarious sufferings 
of Christ." 

The palpably urgent illustrations of "the ex- 
ceeding sinfulness of sin," the depravity of 
human nature, are open to view on every hand, 
103 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

in every region, every rank, and have been 
in every age. 

What is this that a thoughtful writer in a 
secular magazine lately told us of a mother 
in Fez — not exceptionally degraded — who of- 
fered, for a gold-plated watch, to sell to him, 
out and out, her twelve-year-old daughter — a 
noble child, whose picture the writer gave? 
What sow or she-bear would have done this? 

Lately in France, when from a railroad col- 
lision many Americans were hurt, and some in 
and under broken cars crushed and bleeding, 
a family in an uninjured car pulled down the 
curtains and locked the doors, lest the rescued 
wounded and dying might be brought in. What 
Newfoundland or St. Bernard dog would have 
done that? 

Here in New York we have, to be sure, under 
the direct or indirect constraints of Christian 
civilization, frequent exhibitions of unselfish 
and heroic manhood (often only half appre- 
ciated), on the part of our firemen or police- 
104 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

men, to excite our admiration for what man 
may be and do, but all about us, none the less, 
are the illustrations of the most villainous de- 
pravity, in the most infernal meanness, as to 
men and children and especially as to women, 
and Bible and facts declare the sin of the human 
heart — and rational intelligence accepts the 
demonstration — even though it may be pleas- 
ingly sentimental to reject it. 

Says Due de Rochefoucauld : "In the ad- 
versity of our best friends, we often find some- 
thing which does not displease us" ; and Ed- 
mund Burke : "I am convinced that we have 
a degree of delight and that no small one in 
the real misfortunes and pains of others." 
Henry Ward Beecher noted the same disposi- 
tion surviving even in Christian hearts, as to 
the failings of others, and declared that he 
would not stop to say that it was "unchristian" 
because it was "infernal" ! 

Behold this sentimental girl in a New York 
criminal court room. She knows that govern- 
105 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

merit and law are real and repugnant to crime. 
She knows that the judge on the bench repre- 
sents law and righteousness and justice, and is 
called upon by facts and principles alike, and 
by the safety, stability, welfare of society, to 
pronounce severe sentence upon the already 
convicted prisoner in the cage, who has been 
indeed guilty of the most deliberate, cruel and 
dastardly murder from the meanest motives. 
But she declares that having "found herself" 
and having "ideas and ideals," now from her 
own "interior consciousness," she knows that 
the justice, with whom she is acquainted as a 
kind and loving father, will never, never, never 
sentence a fellow man to death ! Still he does, 
and the miscreant goes to the electric chair 
just the same, and the susceptible party dis- 
covers that unreasoning sentimentality does not 
dominate the universe — and cannot any more 
interpret it. And there be editors and minis- 
ters, not a few, who, resembling her in theories, 
1 06 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

may well profit by her experience, and share in 
her enlightenment. 

But not only in what Carlyle calls "the dam- 
nable consciousness of no sin," do the liberals 
fail of intellectual reasonableness, but as to 
all the deeper facts and principles of earth and 
heaven. 

St. John asks pertinently: "He that loveth 
not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he 
love God whom he hath not seen?'' Corre- 
spondingly : He that misses and confuses the 
laws and facts of the earth, that he hath seen, 
how can he independently interpret the laws 
and facts of the overruling heaven, that he hath 
not seen? 

Men talk about the "Fatherhood of God." 
What do they know about the Fatherhood of 
God, or any of the profound realities of His 
earthly or heavenly administration, without a 
revelation from Him about them — what ever 
from their own "interior consciousness," which 
107 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

has notoriously no more abiding validity than 
"a dream when one awaketh"? 

Even Herbert Spencer recognizes a present 
need for a prospective and revealed heaven, 
and says : "The prospect of heaven makes 
life tolerable to many who would else find it 
intolerable. In some with shattered constitu- 
tions and perpetual pains, caused perhaps by 
undue efforts for the benefit of dependents, the 
daily thought of a compensating future is the 
sole assuaging consciousness. . . . And there 
are many who stagger on under the exhausting 
burden of daily duties, fulfilled without thanks 
and without sympathy, who are enabled to bear 
their ills by the conviction that after this life 
will come a life free from pains and weariness. 
Nothing but evil can follow a change in the 
creed of such ; and unless cruelly thoughtless, 
the agnostic will carefully shun discussion of 
religious subjects with them." 

Yes, and a hope of heaven is necessary, not 
only to many "with shattered constitutions and 
1 08 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

perpetual pains/' who "stagger on under the 
exhausting burden of daily duties," but to 
every man, and not only the expectation of 
heaven, but the present daily ministries of 
heaven, and then for these, reliable informa- 
tion about heaven. As to all these, man's need 
and ignorance are coextensive and liberals can- 
not enlighten him as to either realities or con- 
ditions. No, "the new understanding of the 
subconscious realm of mind," whatever else it 
can do, cannot give the faintest clear token of 
heaven's existence or attractions or present con- 
tributions, or ultimate terms of admission, and 
liberals who attempt the spiritual guidance of 
their fellow men, are "cruelly thoughtless," in- 
deed. 

The liberal who reaches the summit of his 
religious faith, in the ethical teachings of Christ 
as edited and interpreted by his own "interior 
consciousness," cannot make good any promise 
of light, as to the law of God, or the love of 
God, or the heaven of God, and is sharply re- 
109 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

buked by Renan himself, who says : "Candid- 
ly speaking, I fail to see how, without the an- 
cient dreams [of evangelical faith] the foun- 
dations of a happy and noble life are to be 
relaid. . . . The ruin of idealistic beliefs may be 
fated to follow hard upon the ruin of super- 
natural beliefs, and the real abasement of the 
morality of humanity date from the day it has 
seen the reality of things." Nothing in fact 
is plainer from causes in God and man alike, 
than that with the "ruin of supernatural be- 
liefs" all spiritual forces and hopes for man- 
kind will have been, in our recognitions, for- 
feited forever. 

In fact, the liberal cannot make good for his 
own spiritual needs. Says Dr. Pentecost: 
"One of the most distinguished scholars of the 
advanced school of Higher Criticism frankly 
confessed to me that his conversion and present 
peace with God were based on the vicarious and 
substitutionary sacrifice of Christ, and that even 
now in daily asking for the forgiveness of sins 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

he always appealed to the divine sacrifice of 
Christ, as Evangelicals understand it. At the 
same time he declared that he could not himself 
preach that gospel, on account of its unphilo- 
sophical and unscientific character." 

And who that has attended the services of 
any but the most ice-bound of the new thought 
preachers has not seen and heard and felt the 
same incompatibility between rationalistic the- 
ories and experience? 

According to the testimony of God and auto- 
biography alike, for life and the love of God, 
mind and heart are both rationally enlisted. 
William Alexander's saying: "That the true 
crown of any soul in dying is Christ, not 
genius, and is faith, not thought," is far better 
rendered: The true crown of any soul in dying 
or in living is Christ and genius, and is faith 
and thought. In this duality within, true men 
must ever live and hope and preach and die. 
They cannot ultimately quit the track of Christ 
in 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and faith, however temporarily derailed by 
thought and genius. 

Furthermore, as already hinted, liberals 
break down when personally before God. If 
these men prayed as they publish, we should 
hear familiarly : God, I thank Thee that I 
am not as other men are, according to their 
own penetential testimony, inadequate in mind, 
unstable in heart, fluctuating in affections, and 
in their state and activities, dependent on Thee, 
and the power and demonstration of the Holy 
Spirit. I thank Thee that I am not as other 
men are, imploringly calling upon Thee for 
power to pray and praise and preach, and con- 
tritely asking for grace in view of failures and 
mistakes in the past ; or even as these poor 
humble traditionalists, who believe in Thy 
Word and say they are "earthen vessels,'' with 
all "excellency of power" from above them. I, 
having ideas and ideals and reliable self-con- 
sciousness, am self-sufficient and equal to the 
situation, above and around and within. I 
112 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

praise Thee for my power and privilege to sit 
in judgment on Thy Word, and to be surely 
accepted of Thee in my rejections and limita- 
tions of its contents. I thank Thee for Christ's 
life and words, and my intellectual competency 
for critically culling from them and finally in- 
terpreting them for myself and others. I thank 
thee that I have vision, and not only detect the 
laws and facts of heaven, but know intuitively 
and exactly and fully how to pray for myself 
and others, and this without distraction or 
volatility of thought or feeling, and how to 
preach from highest, holiest motives, with pre- 
cise and most completely successful adaptation 
to the hundreds of men, women and children, 
in all the variations of their thought, feeling, 
experience, relationship, privileges, duties, des- 
tiny. I thank Thee for my "inner light" and 
its all illuminating adequacy. 

Something like all this we should hear from 
liberal preachers, if they prayed consistently. 
But they do not and cannot so pray, because 
"3 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

the soul is abashed in the presence of its God, 
and the soul's conscience, which unlike the 
thought "consciousness" of which they boast, 
is real and regnant, and before God — as He 
is addressed face to face, forbids it and as St. 
Peter would say, "puts to silence the ignorance 
of foolish men." Not a man of them all can 
in the light and intimacies of a personal audi- 
ence with God comfortably pray for ten min- 
utes, with his soul satisfied in respect of either 
conceptions, sentiments or expressions. All 
enlightened men either pray vertically, and in 
the exercise keep away from God, or praying 
horizontally, approach Him as Evangelical 
Christians do, with the deepest self-abasement, 
until Christ is sighted, and the heavenly music 
detected — "Grace doth much more abound," 
and then the most triumphant joyfulness, in 
the closest intimacies of filial faith and love ! 

Moreover, liberals fail to make good their 
claims, on any ground, for a separate existence. 

The Outlook of Sept. 14, 1907, criticises cer- 
114 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

tain denominational weeklies for censuring men 
like Dr. Gordon, of Boston, C. E. Jefferson, 
Josiah Strong, and Presidents Faunce of 
Brown and Taylor of Vassar for being identi- 
fied with the "International Congress of Re- 
ligious Liberals," at Boston, in September. Is 
this criticism sound? Well, that depends. If 
six Unitarians invite an Evangelical to become 
a seventh, and man a life-boat to rescue the 
shrieking passengers of a ship, pounding to 
pieces on the outer bar; if in a railway wreck 
a Unitarian proposes partnership in the ur- 
gent business of prying and dragging out the 
maimed and dying and dead; if a Unitarian 
physician or philanthropist invites an Evan- 
gelical to aid in extirpation of disease, or in 
feeding the hungry, or in "Sunshine" work, he 
is weakly and wickedly silly who would refuse 
from any scruples of orthodoxy. But suppose 
now that there is no emergency in the case, and 
there are possible and actual, two institutions 
for the help of men for ethical and socialistic 
115 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

work on the same territory. Here is one, a 
purely ethical and human institution (even 
though quoting the supposed ethical teachings 
and example of Christ), yet boldly announced 
as including all things of the Christian religion. 
Here is another, a Christian Church indeed, 
resting on the New Testament basis — having 
due regard for Christ and holiness and fellow- 
ship and also the highest possible enterprises 
for the relief and uplift of men — all with due 
theism and heroism — with the ethical work of 
course as grandly effective as God Himself, 
being duly invoked, can make it. Now if the 
Rev. C. E. Jefferson and his Evangelical asso- 
ciates, having the choice, prefer the former of 
these institutions, they are open to admonition 
from the ranks of orthodoxy, and is it too much 
to say? — to criticism from all intelligent men. 
No doubt they would consistently patronize 
"Abana and Pharpar, rivers of Damascus," 
which have indeed some superficial factors in 
common with the "waters of Israel," if they 
116 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

could do no better, but if the banks of God's 
own Jordan are open to them, will they not 
surely hasten hither, and there abide, as in a 
more congenial situation for themselves, and 
others depending upon them ? 

They can display their energies, to be sure, 
in a remote corner of the camp of Israel, if there 
be no Tabernacle or Holy of Holies, but not 
this consistently, if the corner is in rivalry 
with the heaven-lit center, and the Holy Place 
of God is slighted in the experiment. 

With a modern Moses and God on the one 
side, and Aaron and his fellow liberals com- 
placently rehearsing : "These be thy gods, 
thy ethical gods, O Israel, which brought thee 
up out of the land of Egypt" — on the other, as 
they build ethical altars and with "new 
thought" and the "scientific spirit," anoint 
themselves High Priests, New Testament 
Christians belong over with Moses and God. 

Says the Outlook: "Certain denominational 
weeklies not realizing that religion unites where 
117 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

theology divides, have attacked these men," in 
which are two mistakes; one that New Testa- 
ment religion consists in ethics, and not in 
theism and heroism as including ethics, the 
other, that the "Theology" of hereditary de- 
nominational notions is the only alternative set 
over against liberalism. 

The vanity, and indeed, the stark madness of 
our new attempt to substitute human maxims 
of culture, morality and the virtues, for the 
"Old, Old Story," are most impressively illus- 
trated in the career of Dr. Thomas Chalmers. 
During the first twelve years of his earnest and 
able ministry, as his biographer writes, "Al- 
though his nature was genial and benevolent — 
though he had his chosen friends and longed to 
elevate his parishioners to a higher level of 
intelligence, and domestic comfort, and virtu- 
ous enjoyment — he had not discovered any 
Being possessed of such paramount claims, and 
overwhelming attractions, as to make it end 
enough to live and labor for His sake. But 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

that discovery he made while writing for an 
encyclopaedia an article on Christianity. The 
death of a relation is said to have saddened his 
mind into more than usual thoughtfulness, and 
whilst engaged in the researches which his 
task demanded, the scheme of God was mani- 
fested to his astonished understanding, and the 
Son of God was revealed to his admiring and 
adoring affections !" 

On page 205, Vol. IV of his "Select 
Works," occurs his eloquent avowal of this 
change, from which the following is an ex- 
tract : 

"I cannot but record the effect of an actual, 
though undesigned, experiment which I prose- 
cuted for upward of twelve years among you. 
For the greater part of that time I could ex- 
patiate on the manners of dishonesty, on vil- 
lainy of falsehood, on the despicable arts of 
calumny; in a word, upon all those deformities of 
character which awake thenaturalindignationof 
the human heart against the pests and the dis- 
119 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

turbers of human society. It never occurred to 
me that all this might have been done, and yet 
every soul of every hearer might have remained 
in full alienation from God. . . . But the in- 
teresting fact is that during the whole of that 
period in which I made no attempt against the 
natural enmity of the mind to God, I certainly 
did press the reformations of honor and truth 
and integrity among my people, but I never 
once heard of any such reformation having 
been effected among them. I am not sensible 
that all the vehemence with which I urged the 
virtues and the proprieties of social life had the 
weight of a feather on the moral habits of my 
parishioners. And it was not till I got im- 
pressed by the utter alienation of the heart in 
all its desires and affections from God; it was 
not till reconciliation to Him became the dis- 
tinct and the prominent object of my ministerial 
exertions; it w r as not till the free offer of for- 
giveness through the blood of Christ was urged 
upon their acceptance, and the Holy Spirit 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

given through the channel of Christ's media- 
tion to all who ask Him, was set before them 
as the unceasing object of their dependence and 
their prayers, that I ever heard of any of those 
subordinate reformations which I aforetime 
made the earnest and the zealous, but, I am 
afraid, at the same time, the ultimate object of 
my earlier ministrations. You have taught me 
that to preach Christ is the only effective way 
of preaching morality in all its branches; and 
out of your humble cottages have I gathered 
a lesson which I pray God that I may be en- 
abled to carry, with all its simplicity, into a 
wider theater." 

Says Dr. Charles Parkhurst : ''When a 
preacher says that the fundamental fact in 
Christianity is not conversion to a personal 
Ihrist, but conversion to the humanitarian work 
that Christ came to do and encourage, he is 
giving the direct lie to facts as the Gospel states 
them, to the truth as Christ declared it, and to 
the Spirit as the first disciples exemplified it." 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

The Pride of Rationalism just now so vari- 
ously in evidence, as substituting man's culture, 
thought and schemes of reformation, for Bible 
religion in its glad entirety, is indeed one of the 
Hindrances to the Organized Christianity of 
the New Testament — though, to be sure, of 
short duration. It is really a recrudescence of 
Judaism and not Christianity. Human nature, 
with Emerson, cries : "If you want to raise 
me, you must stand above me" ; and men, awak- 
ened men, eagerly demand what God immutably 
assigns — heaven-given Christianity. 

Meanwhile, with life so short and God so 
urgent and man so straitened, does it not seem 
a pity indeed that journals like the Outlook 
and Independent and measurably the Homilet- 
ical Review and Christian Work and Evangel- 
ist should devote so much time and such noble 
gifts to an enterprise which has no raison d'etre 
whatever, and in which things delusively par- 
tial are substituted for and inimical to the di- 
122 



'ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

vine fulness of God's family and redemption 
love and plans ? 

But what of Denominational Pride of Ec- 
clesiastical Power? New Testament Chris- 
tianity, after world-wide triumphs, "through 
much tribulation," for three centuries, was be- 
trayed into the hands of ecclesiastical ambition, 
and until the Reformation, remained in bond- 
age, with every factor of its ends and means 
perverted to the ingenious purposes and am- 
bitious pretensions of the Roman hierarchy. 
Our Saviour was indeed recognized in theory, 
but in fact, according to Mark Twain's obser- 
vations afterward, usually presented in subor- 
dination to the Virgin Alary, the reigning Pon- 
tiff, some favorite cardinal, some canonized 
saint, and then as an infant in arms. 

Development of spiritual character was such 
as officiating priests with official benedictions 
and ceremonies could effect : Fellowship, not 
of Christ's sanctified followers as such, but 
punctilious church members as such : Works ac- 
123 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

cepted and rewarded, not so much as they honor 
God and avail for sinning and wretched men, 
but as they celebrate the sacred persons and 
promote the religious institutions of the Roman 
Church : The Bible held back from at once the 
personal "search" of the people, and the ration- 
al and scientific "criticism" of reverent scholar- 
ship ; The Holy Spirit efficacious only at the 
pleasure and in the rites of priest or bishop. 

And with what results? The results which 
always follow when men usurp the prerogatives 
of God — weak and beclouded intellectuality 
and conscientiousness in high places; vice and 
ignorance in low places; civic corruption and 
"graft" in the state; God and His Church dis- 
honored, and man in sin and misery neglected. 

Says Dr. Charles Parkhurst : "In this con- 
nection it occurs to me to wonder whether we, 
who claim to be thorough-going Protestants, 
are not treating Catholicism, and the system of 
moral dry-rot that Catholicism is bound to en- 
gender, with a gingerliness that even the most 
124 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

generous liberality of Christian view is no suf- 
ficient warrant for. Granting that we are under 
obligations to treat with deference the religious 
views of others, we have no business to treat 
with any degree of consideration a system 
nominally religious that is nevertheless leav- 
ing, and everywhere leaving, a religious and 
moral blight behind it. The proper purpose of 
religion is to produce the finest type of per- 
sonal manhood and womanhood. Religion is 
not good for anything, as religion, unless it 
will do that : and the Catholic religion — by 
which I am understanding of course now the 
Papacy — is not doing that, and has not been 
doing it for centuries. The very thing that 
Protestantism is laboring to construct, Catholi- 
cism is calculated to do nothing but destroy. The 
Papacy is not christianizing the world, but dere- 
ligionizing it. In confirmation of this we have 
only to look at Spain, Italy, France, Belgium. 
The more operative the Catholic Church has 
been in any country, the worse the condition it 
125 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

leaves it in. There is no use in blinking these 
matters. Facts are facts. Roman Catholicism, 
as at the present administered, is an incubus 
upon the body, mind and conscience of every 
nation and every institution that comes in any 
measure under its influence and despotism." 

But strange to say, the Pride of Ecclesiastical 
Power is wonderfully fascinating after all. As 
usual with the multitudes, and to an astonish- 
ing degree even with intelligent thinkers, pre- 
posterous claims in the name of religion with 
no ultimate validity whatever — whether of 
Catholic or Episcopalian or Christian Scientist 
or Mormon — will marvelously carry the day, if 
adroitly formulated and then solemnly and per- 
sistently asserted. 

So one is interested to read in Cardinal New- 
man's ''Apologia," of Hurrell Froude — to the 
end an adherent of the Church of England : 
"He professed openly his admiration of the 
Church of Rome, and his hatred of the Reform- 
ers. He delighted in the notion of an hier- 
126 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

archical system, of sacerdotal power and full 
ecclesiastical liberty. He felt scorn of the max- 
im, 'The Bible and the Bible only is the religion 
of Protestants,' and he gloried in accepting 
tradition as a main instrument of religious 
teaching. He taught me to look with admira- 
tion toward the Church of Rome, and in the 
same degree to dislike the Reformation. He 
fixed deep in me the idea of devotion to the 
blessed Virgin, and he led me gradually to be- 
lieve in the Real Presence. He was powerfully 
drawn to the Medieval Church, but not to the 
Primitive." Precisely, and for thirteen hun- 
dred years, almost the entire world of religious 
thought was "powerfully drawn to the Medie- 
val Church" and dominated by it, but just the 
same, the Primitive was and is, the New Testa- 
ment Church before which in the twentieth 
century, the Medieval institution with all its 
pretentions and attractions, is doomed to pass 
away. 

Indeed, since the Reformation it has lived 
127 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

on "borrowed time," with its glory departed, 
and "Ichahod" distinctly traceable on its fading 
and diminishing banners. It is still boastful 
but moribund. Moreover, very much the same 
may be said of its daughter, the Church of 
England, which even now, in its ecclesiastical 
aspects, sits precariously, as an ambitious, sub- 
servient, melancholy deck-house on the splendid 
hull of English civilization, under distinct noti- 
fication of eviction for trespass. 

The ante-Reformation Pride of Ecclesiastical 
Power has been feebly projected over to the 
present day, but New Testament Christianity, 
the "Primitive" Church, will soon, in the twen- 
tieth century, repeat its conquests of the first 
century, and Pride of Ecclesiastical Power in a 
modern churchman will go the way of Pride of 
Ecclesiastical Power in the ancient Church of 
the Scribes and Pharisees. To this the present- 
day Zeitgeist of religious liberty, nobler politi- 
cal forces, new intellectuality in all ranks and 
regions, the Bible itself and the ominous pre- 
128 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sagings of the Christ-kingdom, are already 
powerfully contributing. Says Mr. Beecher : 
"I give you fair notice of my intention. I will 
attempt, as I have attempted, to put down ec- 
clesiasticism, here and everywhere, as not in 
accordance with the highest plane of Christian 
experience, nor with the best interpretation of 
the New Testament, nor with the dictates of 
the Holy Spirit as poured out upon the hearts 
of God's people everywhere." 

Since the Reformation, however, the para- 
mount affliction of the Church, the subtle 
tyranny at the front, by which organized Chris- 
tianity has been specially repressed and post- 
poned, has been Denominational Pride of Creed 
Opinion. Immediately after the Reformation, 
instead of uniting in the name of Christ for a 
resurrection and rehabilitation of the Primitive 
Church, instead of a Protestant organization 
on a New Testament basis for the ends of 
Christianity by New Testament means, the 
Protestant leaders, in their pride of intellect, 
129 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

began to fight over dogmas of doctrine and 
polity, and have been intrenched and assiduous 
in belligerent or rival camps ever since. 

For four centuries, losing sight of the essen- 
tials of the New Testament, as furnishing the 
scriptural and scientific basis of organization, 
and with vigorous thinking and elaboration 
over the non-essentials, the denominationalists 
have enshrined these at the various centers, 
and essaying the transcendent campaigns of 
Christianity with a hopelessly divided army, 
have calamitously failed of conquest and char- 
acter, both at once. 

And with what controlling animus ? Pride — 
the self-complacent notion, that having arrived 
at a religious conclusion, each man was privi- 
leged to establish and worship it wherever he 
pleased, and as devoutly as he pleased, and 
as exclusively as he pleased, which is indeed the 
essence of denominationalism. 

From first to last it has been indisputably 
manifest, that the four New Testament ends 
130 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

of Christianity could be surely, triumphantly, 
universally and always attained by the four 
New Testament means, yet Christian men of 
every variety, in all the years have insisted upon 
repudiating the divine scheme at the instance 
of their hereditary pride of opinion, in conse- 
quence of which, instead of a united Church of 
Christ for Christ, there are in this country more 
than one hundred and forty Protestant denomi- 
nations, with thirty of them active and self- 
asserting, as in evidence in Federation or 
Students' or Missionary Conventions, none of 
them pretending to special intelligence, holiness 
or efficiency — only "We are entitled to our 
opinions like the rest — and enjoy promulgat- 
ing them," they say. 

Take the Presbyterians : You ask one of 
them the grounds for a separate denominational 
organization. Will he point out to you any 
monopoly of or indeed any practical advan- 
tage for any of the ends or means of Chris- 
tianity? \\ nether you quote the three root 
131 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

peculiarities of Presbyterianism : Parity in the 
ministry, ruling elders and church courts — or 
more widely, its doctrines and polity, can he 
point to any facts or necessary principles which 
attest its superiority, not to say monopoly, in 
any good thing? 

Take the Church of to-day. Can your Pres- 
byterian conduct you to any scene of experience 
or work and exhibiting the rare attainments or 
triumphant operations of some Five Point Cal- 
vinist, show that if James M. Buckley or some 
other well-equipped Methodist had been 'there, 
the results would have been wholly different ? 

Does ever, anywhere a Presbyterian, stand- 
ing up in any community, proclaim : Behold, 
because of our Presbyterianism we surpass all 
the other Christians here in honor of Christ, 
holiness of character, power in the world and 
acceptance with God? 

"But our forefathers through the years have 
attested their devotion to these standards, for 
which they were ready to forego all things, 
132 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

even life, and these they have bequeathed to 
us as a sacred heritage.'' Now these Pres- 
byterian forefathers have been the theme 
of hundreds of special occasion sermons, and 
are worthy of a little special attention. In the 
first place, any number of worthy, level-headed 
men will die for any doctrine or system which 
they have espoused, when they are attacked 
and "get mad." So a "Wee-Free," or any of 
the "Split P's" of Scotland, or a Southern Pres- 
byterian, would be beggared, or die, sooner 
than recant. This, however, while it attests 
the polemic spunk of the party, proves noth- 
ing whatever as to the validity or value of his 
peculiar views. 

This writer has a Scotch friend who used 
to swear at Revision of the Standards, and 
we all know that a man, from early education, 
may adhere with enthusiastic steadfastness to 
the specialties of Presbyterianism, and yet neg- 
lect the central Christianity and be a godless, 
useless, even pernicious man. 
133 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

In fact, in the crises of their living or dying, 
the great men of denominational Church his- 
tory, who have been heroic and true, and "wit- 
nessed a good confession" before God and men, 
have uniformly attributed their triumphs and 
their hopes to the ends and means of New Tes- 
tament Christianity, with evidently their de- 
nominational peculiarities — a passing accident 
of their experiences. 

All the Presbyterian orators know perfectly 
well that if in any testing, trying experiences 
of any great Presbyterian's religious life, a 
John Wesley or some other Methodist, true to 
and full of God in His Word, and Son and 
Spirit, had been substituted for him, the record 
would have been just as conspicuously glorious. 

Under summons to "Come up Higher," 
through an incurable disease, Joseph Addison 
Alexander, of the Princeton Theological Sem- 
inary, the most accomplished scholar the 
American Church has ever produced, walking 
up and down his study, was overheard to recite 
134 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

with all the fervor and appropriation of a little 
child : 

"Just as I am, without one plea, 
But that thy blood was shed for me, 
And that thou bid'st me come to thee, 
O Lamb of God, I come ! 

"Just as I am, and waiting- not 
To rid my soul of one dark blot, 
To thee whose blood can cleanse each spot, 
O Lamb of God, I come ! 

"Just as I am, though tossed about 
With many a conflict, many a doubt, 
Fightings within, and fears without, 
O Lamb of God, I come ! 

"Just as I am — poor, wretched, blind; 
Sight, riches, healing of the mind, 
Yea, all I need, in thee to find, 
O Lamb of God, I come ! 
135 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

"Just as 1 am — thou wilt receive. 
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve; 
Because thy promise I believe, 
O Lamb of God, I come ! 

"Just as I am — thy love unknown 
Hath broken every barrier down ; 
Now, to be thine, yea, thine alone, 
O Lamb of God, I come!" 

And in this he presented a representative pic- 
ture of all God's great Presbyterians in all 
the centuries. They were attached to their 
Presbyterianism, but in any crises of duty or 
experience, they appealed to Christianity, just 
like an intelligent and spiritually-minded 
Methodist or Independent, and were never dis- 
appointed. 

Several years ago in opposing Revision, 
Prof. William Brenton Greene, of Princeton, 
penned this characteristic and plausible state- 
ment : The Confession "is the banner under 
136 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

which the Presbyterian Church has conquered. 
She has become the power that she is in for- 
eign and home evangelization, and as the cham- 
pion of both religious and civil liberty, through 
devotion to its principles." 

What section of its principles? In fact, the 
Christian section, irrespective of the sectarian 
section, and in some respects, in spite of this, 
indeed. 

AH which calls up a scene of athletes on a 
race track. Instead of ''laying aside every 
weight" and giving their vital forces the fullest 
opportunity in the highest liberty, these in mad- 
ness of antiquarian subserviency load them- 
selves up with "grandfathers" overcoats and 
boots, and after a fashion, to be sure, run; 
then, afterwards, congratulate themselves : 
"We had power and were champions because of 
our devotion to our forefathers' outfit." 

When Ernest Renan — right for once in his 
life — declared that Calvin succeeded in his 
work as a reformer "because he was the most 
137 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Christian man of his age," he uttered a generic 
truth, pertinent to all Calvinists. 

It is highly edifying to hear Dr. William 
H. Roberts, the erstwhile chief apostle of Pres- 
byterianism in this country, at a "Brotherhood" 
Convention last year, in discussing the topic, 
"The Presbyterian Church — what it stands 
for,'' present in answer the following points: 

"i. Loyalty to the priceless American heri- 
tage of individual liberty and popular gov- 
ernment. 

"2. The right and duty of every Christian 
to be a worker for Christ. 

"3. The spiritual character and purposes of 
the Church, as Christ's agent for the salvation 
of men and the regeneration of the world. 

"4. The unity of the Church, emphasizing 
the need that Christians should strive not 
against one another, but with one another, for 
the doing of Christ's work in the world. 

"5. That a living Church must evidence its 
life by its evangelistic and missionary work. 

138 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

"6. That the supreme duty of the Church is 
loyalty to Jesus Christ and to the Holy Scrip- 
tures as the law of Christ for both faith and 
conduct." To which he added : "May all these 
things abound increasingly in our midst as a 
Church; may they permeate with increasing 
power all Christian Churches !" Even so, but 
just this is New Testament Christianity, and 
is most appositely prophetic. Just this will 
indeed characterize the Presbyterian Church 
when it has unloaded its water-logged hull, and 
casting overboard its superfluous wares, has 
gracefully floated up to the water-line of Evan- 
gelical Christianity. So will it indeed realize 
"what it stands for." 

Then here are for the Church, rejoicing in 
its new and true ideals, additional considera- 
tions, indicating its coming uplift for duty and 
opportunity, and corrective of its Pride. 

It is perfectly fair to gauge any Church by 
its relation to the "Great Commission." Do 
Presbyterian Missionaries or visiting Secre- 
139 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

taries return to this land to report anywhere the 
splendid conquests of purely Presbyterian ideas 
of truth or polity or plan, as set over against 
the inferiority and failure of Methodist, Bap- 
tist or Congregational missions? Does any 
one recall a singfe instance of this? 

Then redemption work at home — what is 
this report of what Dr. J. Wilbur Chapman, 
the General Assembly's special Evangelist, is 
saying in the Federation Convention? 

'Tie spoke thrillingly on Interdenominational 
Evangelization, which he believes to be the only 
potent method of evangelization. It is vastly 
easier to make Christians than Baptists, Metho- 
dists or Presbyterians. The one is the gift of 
God; the other mainly a matter of birth or 
argument. Denominational evangelization 
cannot arrest the attention of a city; no single 
denomination can control the force of the 
church and its whole force is needed to shake 
a city. Every denominational revival awakens 
prejudice somewhere; work for Jesus and not 
140 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

for the denomination, and prejudice is gone 
and the city moved. Four years of evangelistic 
work along these lines have made Dr. Chap- 
man look forward with confidence to a great 
national revival/' 

For three years he said he had conducted his 
campaigns, trying to make men Presbyterians 
and failed, later he aimed to make them Chris- 
tians and succeeeded — which, being in the in- 
terests of accuracy, corrected, means that for 
three years he tried to make sinners Christians 
by exclusively Presbyterian agencies and failed, 
while he succeeded as a New Testament Chris- 
tian. 

For years the call to Presbyterians has been, 
with single aim and heroic energy and apostolic 
spirituality and unity, to preach and propagate 
New Testament Christianity, and leave its Cal- 
vinism and other denominational specialties to 
take care of themselves amid the wholesome 
agitations, si f tings and adjustments of genu- 
141 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ine spiritual and scriptural operations. To do 
this ought not to require much faith. 

Where is the blessed magician, who can 
take Dr. Charles Hodge's Lectures, and putting 
them on a potter's wheel, remold them until 
the doctrines of Christian Ends and Means 
have been manipulated up to the glowing apex 
and the Presbyterian specialties duly gyrated 
down to the base — not necessarily entirely off 
the disk, however? 

Dr. Archibald Alexander Hodge, after his 
father, Professor of Theology at the Princeton 
Theological Seminary, may be appropriately 
quoted at this point : "Each of these parties 
hold all essential truth, and therefore they hold 
actually very much the same truth. The Armin- 
ians think and speak very much like Calvinists 
when they come to talk with God in either the 
confession of sin, or the supplication for grace. 
They both alike in that attitude recognize the 
sovereignty of God and the guilt and helpless- 
ness of men. Indeed, how could it be other- 
142 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

wise? What room is there for anything other 
than essential Calvinism, on one's knees? On 
the other hand, the Calvinist thinks and speaks 
like the better class of Arminians, when he 
addresses the consciences of men and pleads 
with them as free, responsible agents to repent 
and believe in Christ. The difference between 
the best of either class is one of emphasis rather 
than of essential principle. Each is the com- 
plement of the other. Each is necessary to re- 
strain, correct, and supply the one-sided strain 
of the other. They together give origin to 
the blended strain from which issues the per- 
fect music which utters the perfect truth." 

Then again : "This matter of free-will un- 
derlies everything. If you bring it to question, 
it is infinitely more than Calvinism. ... I 
believe in Calvinism and I say that free-will 
stands before Calvinism. Everything is gone 
if free-will is gone. The moral system' is gone 
if free-will is gone. You cannot escape ex- 
cept by Materialism on the one hand or Pan- 
143 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

theism on the other. Hold hard, therefore, to 
the doctrine of free-will." 

In all this, feasibility and solution are sug- 
gested by this simple comment of Prof. Will- 
iam C. Wilkinson's : "In characterization of 
Mr. Punshon's published sermons and address- 
es, it deserves to be said, first and most em- 
phatically, that they are throughout 'all com- 
pact' of gospel pure and undefiled. The note 
of absolute loyalty to Scripture is everywhere 
clearly heard, and it is as clearly everywhere 
the dominant note. To the lover of evangelical 
truth needing no flavor of 'advanced' thought 
to commend it to his relish, this character in 
Mr. Punshon's utterances is an immense sat- 
isfaction. Mr. Spurgeon himself was not more 
straightly orthodox than was Mr. Punshon. 
Barring the difference between them of Cal- 
vin istic and Arminian, the two men preached 
one and the same gospel, and together bore 
agreeing testimony to the inspiration and au- 
thority of the Bible as being throughout, from 
144 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Genesis to Revelation, the unmixed Word of 
God." 

Says an editorial in the Southern Presby- 
terian of South Carolina : "We would not go 
the length of saying that all theological differ- 
ences are unimportant. But the important ones 
are not those which divide Arminians and Cal- 
vinists, but those which divide unitarians and 
trinitarians and those which divide the papacy 
from Protestantism. The Arminio-Calvinistic 
difference cannot affect any soul injuriously, 
except as it is made to do duty as a cause for 
division. The Arminians sing and pray Cal- 
vinism. The Calvinists frequently preach and 
practice Arminianism. Take the labels off 
them and their own mothers would not be able 
to tell them apart, very often." 

And hear Dr. R. F. Coyle : "Splits and 
schisms and separations are a reproach which 
cannot be too soon taken away from our Presr 
byterian churches. No amount of fine, theo- 
logical thinking can make it right for us to be 
145 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

apart. . Calvinism is no more synonymous with 
Christianity than John Calvin is synonymous 
with Jesus Christ. The Confession is not the 
Bible ; the Genevan is not the Galilean." 

So when the question arises : Why is not 
Preshyterianism duly fused into Organized 
Christianity? the answer is: Denominational 
Pride of inherited opinion. 

But study now this Baptist. 

Of course at the outset he is embarrassed by 
his opponents. These, like himself, in an Old 
Testament bondage, drag the unsettled par- 
ticulars of rites and ceremonies up to the height 
and moment of the New Testament Spirit and 
Truth and Life. 

The practice of infant baptism may be said 
to be Scripturally appropriate, and there is no 
doubt at all that when parents "full of faith and 
the Holy Ghost" and the love of Christ and 
prayers, dedicate their children to God with the 
outward sign of their Christianity, they are 
accepted of Heaven — sign and dedication both. 
146 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

But the usual ''arguments" for infant baptism 
would carry almost any rite or regulation of 
the Old Testament over into the New, unless 
it was definitely prohibited — tithing or poverty 
of the priests for example. So the Baptist may 
be a little excused for his sectarianism, until 
there is a grand striking of outlying sectarian 
tents for a concerted movement up to and with- 
in the central tabernacle of Christianity. Still 
there is no valid excuse for his separate or- 
ganization on the general premises, of Chris- 
tianity after all. According to his own evan- 
gelical theories, these general premises are tre- 
mendously crowded and all parties infinitely 
straitened by the New Testament factors of 
Ends and Means, and there is no time or room 
for emphasis upon any subordinate theories or 
beliefs, even if sincere men do entertain, and 
imagine that they can logically defend them. 
To quote the eminent Baptist, Prof. J. B. 
Thomas : "We pervert the truth when we put 
party and sect above Christ. The most pug- 
147 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

nacious Baptist I ever saw was an unconverted 
man. He knew the Scriptures. He could 
argue long and well for immersion. He would 
grow indignant in his championship of our 
tenets, yet admitted that he was not a Chris- 
tian. He never professed to be. I am sorry 
to say that I once heard a doctor of divinity 
exclaim, T hope that I am a Christian, but I 
know that I am a Baptist!' These both come 
under the indignant rebuke of Paul, 'God for- 
bid that I should glory, save in the cross of 
Jesus Christ!' 'Circumcision availeth nothing, 
uncircumcision nothing, but a new creature.' 
A spirit of partisan zeal mars and warps the 
spirit of Christianity. To say, T am of Paul 
and I of Cephas,' is practically to affirm that 
Christ is divided." 

Very soon indeed the Baptist, in behalf of 
Christianity, has to abandon formulating and 
emphasizing ritualistic conceptions, even if in 
a sense Scriptural. ' He stands for the mode 
of Baptism, but can find no time or place for 
148 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

the Scriptural physical particulars, the mode, 
of the Lord's Supper. He has no time or 
place for rules for fasting, no time or place for 
our Saviour's washing of feet and his sacred 
instruction, "If I then, your Lord and Master, 
have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash 
one another's feet. For I have given you an 
example, that ye should do as I have done to 
you." 

The charge against the Baptist is not neces- 
sarily, that his denominational views are er- 
roneous, but that he comes upon the hallowed 
territories of God's grandest family and re- 
demption operations, and man's desperate 
emergency, distracting and weakening, unnec- 
essarily, and with strange partiality and in- 
consistency. 

Then, too, he has had experience. At North- 
field or a Young Men's Christian Association 
gathering, gladly, devoutly, passionately, ef- 
fectively, he has studied the Bible, developed 
in Christian character, blessed other Christians, 
149 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sought the lost, enjoyed God and Heaven with 
others — intelligent, spiritual, heavenly minded, 
heavenly hearted Christians, as Christians. 
Now he returns to his denominational Church 
and communes and cooperates with whom, and 
on what basis? With Baptists as Baptists — 
with those who may or may not have any Chris- 
tian zeal for God or man or any fellowship 
love for him, beyond what gives the presump- 
tion that they may be Christians and keeps them 
above immortality. 

As a practical statement, in behalf of the 
Ends and Means of Christianity, God at first 
by His Word, and by His providence, excuses 
His children from rites and ceremonies, and 
then afterwards in the unity, and fellowship 
and enterprises of Christ the Head, employs 
them after all, to bless the one body in Christ. 
According to His Word and providence, God 
has no use for ritualistic observances in His 
family, in any dividing preeminence. 

Most significant and substantially sound and 
150 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Scriptural are the words of Dr. Norman Fox : 
"The only practicable scheme for such a union 
would be one which waived entirely the ques- 
tion, what constitutes New Testament baptism, 
which eliminated completely the discussion 
whether the use of affusion and the baptism of 
infants is according to Scripture. Such a plan 
would be found in a Church which admitted 
to the Church supper and to full membership 
any believer, baptised or unbaptised. If the 
Church welcomed to its ranks one, who, being 
of Quaker training, did not believe in water 
baptism and so had been neither immersed nor 
sprinkled, the Baptist member could vote to 
accept the person who had received only infant 
baptism, without thereby impliedly acknowl- 
edging that such baptism is valid. Baptism 
would thus be made no longer a Church or- 
dinance, but a question of private duty, 
like the giving of a tenth of one's income 
in benevolence. The member of such a 
Church could privately be immersed or sprin- 
J5 1 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

kled or have his children baptised by any 
one whom he could find to administer the cere- 
mony, while the pastor of the church could de- 
cline to perform any rite in which he did not 
believe. In such a Church all controversy re- 
garding baptism would be eliminated as thor- 
oughly as from a Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation. 

If Congregationalists and Baptists could 
all be brought to see that water baptism is not 
made by the New Testament an essential to 
Church membership, that the Church of Christ 
should be open to all the disciples of Christ ir- 
respective of baptism, then, though each re- 
tained its own beliefs as to what constitutes 
true baptism, these two great bodies could be- 
come one. There are Baptist Churches in Eng- 
land which are organized on this principle, and 
there are Baptists in America who believe it to 
be the principle of the New Testament." 

But what of the Episcopalians as obstructing 
the "Way of the Lord" in Denominational 
*5 2 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Pride of opinion? We have already referred 
to their English division in its Pride of ec- 
clesiastical power, and in so far as it is allied 
with Government, and as John Stuart Mill ex- 
presses it, is "a branch of the civil service" ; 
but what of their denominational pride of creed 
opinion ? 

From the viewpoint of New Testament 
Christianity it must in all honesty be said in 
answer, that the Episcopal Church sins pre- 
eminently in this respect and with the least 
excuse — Scriptural, intellectual, historical or 
experimental. In the first place it behooves its 
advocates to come upon the common domain 
under due restraints of modest self-suspicion 
because as a denomination it is so very small. 
With all the advantages of an early start, social 
and political prestige, easy terms of admission, 
it is but one-ninth as large as the Methodist 
Church, one-eighth as large as the Baptist, while 
the Presbyterian and Lutheran each outnumber 
it two and a half times. 
153 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Then in comparison it is weak intellectually. 
President Eliot, of Harvard, was suavely polite 
to the Episcopal divines when he said to them : 
"I do not admire your intellectual frugality," 
but, "rebuking and exhorting" in this respect, 
"its own Bishops and other Clergy" protest 
in terms quite too derisive and scornful for 
these pages ; which leads to the remark that 
contemptuous scornfulness would seem to be 
curiously germane to this Church, and whether 
it appears as between Ritualists and Evangel- 
icals within the fold, or as addressed to non- 
Episcopalians and especially Reformed Episco- 
palians without, or from without from Roman 
Catholic sources, is extremely suggestive of 
ecclesiastical and spiritual weakness. 

Moreover, beyond all other Protestant Chris- 
tians, without exception, these "feeble folk" ex- 
ploit their denominational pride in refusing the 
recognitions and cooperations of Christian 
unity. For the sake of the Christ, and truth 
and spiritual power of New Testament Chris- 
154 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

tianity, which they share in common, minis- 
ters and laymen of other denominations gladly 
unite with others in services and Christian 
work, just as far as the root interests of their 
respective Churches, as they conceive them, will 
permit. Not so these. Why? Because of 
their pure unreasoning Pride of denominational 
claims and dreams, founded upon the notion 
that they monopolize the authority and grace 
of the Head of the Church in the "apostolic and 
historic succession." 

In 1903 the Churchman made public pro- 
fession of its faith thus : " It is a serious re- 
flection on Christendom at the present moment 
to contrast the interests and hopes founded on 
the institution of the Hague Peace Tribunal 
with the half-hearted discussion of Christian 
reunion. The impulse which has brought na- 
tions to acquiesce in the formation of a perma- 
nent Court of Arbitration is thoroughly Chris- 
tian — while the acquiescence in sectarian divi- 
sion and discord is thoroughly unchristian. 
155 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

The Church is bound to follow here the leader- 
ship of the state. To refuse to do so is to 
cease to influence whatever stands for the best 
and highest elements in modern life. 

Reunion is vital to the essence of Chris- 
tianity. When the Christian Church realizes 
that this is the supreme and imminent question 
to discuss and to settle, she will have gone far 
to regain the paramount influence which by 
nature belongs to her. Any kind of activity, 
treated from the sectarian point of view, is 
more disheartening than inspiring. To hold 
conferences and meetings for great Christian 
purposes on sectarian lines, is as ineffective as 
it would be to allow political partisanship to 
control the organs of national life." 

And in 1905 recanted thus : "A correspond- 
ent asks in another column : Would you 'give 
up the principle and the fact of the Apostolic 
Succession if thereby the unity of Christians 
. . . could be secured to-morrow?' The ques- 
tion is representative, and, whether in the form 

156 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

in which Mr. Bailey asks it or in some other, 
causes wide and deep anxiety whenever unity 
is discussed. In its broadest aspect, it is equiv- 
alent to asking, 'Shall the ministry which has 
been committed to the Church as a trust be 
given up?' The answer is inevitable that such 
a betrayal of trust is impossible. One cannot 
give up that which is not his. The Church 
cannot give up that which was committed to 
her in trust. The moral obligations of so sim- 
ple a proposition cannot be escaped." 

Such a disappointment! The Churchman in 
1903 crying after (however unconsciously), 
and starting straight for Organized Chris- 
tianity, and then in 1905 shunted off and de- 
railed at the station of its own denominational 
and gratuitous pride! 

"The principle and fact of the Apostolic 

Succession" before and above the "Unity of 

• Christians," as Christians! The ministry "as 

a trust" lowered to and identified with the 

157 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

"principle and fact of the Apostolic Succes- 
sion" ! 

Do the thinkers of the Episcopal Church re- 
alize in what a low estate this locates the min- 
istry? The good men are sorely bestead al- 
ready, with feeble fraternity, yes and fierce 
conflicts among themselves, with exclusive and 
arrogant claims advanced for them, to which, in 
scholarship or piety, or influence, they cannot 
at all respond, and here they are linked and 
made subservient to, the baseless dreams of 
"Apostolic Succession." 

But is it a baseless dream? That is what the 
scholarship of the world says, and what more 
and more the highest scholarship of Episco- 
pacy itself says. The most eminent scholars, 
who are of the "succession" and having all the 
extra acumen it might be supposed to confer, 
agree with Prof. John DeWitt : "For if there 
is such a thing as the 'Historic Episcopate,' a 
succession of Bishops from the Apostles on- 
ward, those who belong to the succession ought 

158 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

to know who are in the succession. What is 
the judgment of the Bishops, who are by com- 
mon consent in this line (if there be such a 
line) as to the Historic Episcopate of the 
Anglican bodies? The Episcopal Church ac- 
knowledges the Apostolic character of the 
Roman Catholic Episcopate and Apostolic char- 
acter of the Greek Episcopate. But has the 
compliment ever been returned ? Has the Greek 
Church acknowledged the claim of a single 
English Bishop to a place in the Apostolic 
succession? It has not only never acknowl- 
edged it, but has refused to do so, though Eng- 
lish Bishops have sought such recognition. 
And as for the Roman Catholic Church — is it 
not notorious that whenever a 'vert' has passed 
over from Anglicanism into the Roman Cath- 
olic Church, whether 'Bishop/ 'Priest' or 
'Deacon,' he has been received as a simple lay- 
man? This is 'the colorless light of history.' 
Suppose that those whom the Anglicans recog- 
nize as Bishops in the line of the Apostolic suc- 
159 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

cession were to meet together. The Roman 
Catholic Bishops, including- mitred Abbots, etc., 
would number about twelve hundred ; the 
Greek Bishops about three hundred, and the 
Anglican Bishops about two hundred and sev- 
enty. This College of Bishops, according to 
the Anglican theory of the Historic Episco- 
pate, is the College of the successors of the 
Apostles. Here is the wisdom of the Church 
of God. This is the one body that can 'try the 
spirits.' " 

Says Mr. Lecky, the Historian : "Can the 
theory of a communion between the Latin and 
Anglican Churches be really maintained 
though the Latin body scornfully repudiates 
it, though the articles, the homilies and the 
early theology of the English Church breathe 
the most uncompromising hostility to the 
Papacy, though the blood of so many martyrs 
has attested the gravity of the separation?" 

The whole contention for the "succession" is 
based upon the alleged vital relation of the Eng- 
160 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

lish Church to the Roman up to and after the 
separation — up to the separation as a part of 
the old Church and after the separation as co- 
ordinate with it. The significant fact is how- 
ever that the Trunk repudiated the Branch on 
both sides of the point of departure. The 
Roman Church even before the schism of 1532 
denounced in general, any such partnership 
with or separation from or coordination with 
itself, and has done so specifically and even 
fiercely, ever since. 

The Episcopal Church is very like a man 
vociferously boasting of a precious jewel and 
asking extraordinary credit, and claiming large 
concessions by virtue of it, when he can never 
in any way exhibit it as in his possession, and 
never present any documentary proof that he 
ever received it, while in the meantime a rival 
party, older and richer, comes forth, and shows 
the necessary documents of rightful possession, 
when suddenly in the light of day the treasure 
161 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

is found after all to be no substantial jewel 
at all, but only a simulacrum, a delusive bauble. 

The denominational Pride of the modern 
Episcopalian is a wonder indeed. In respect of 
other Protestant Churches it appears in full 
play of most baseless and gratuitous exclusive- 
ness and self-assertion. Toward the Greek and 
Roman Churches it disappears in an almost 
shameless want of self-respect, in persistently 
courting an affiliation, so scornfully and unani- 
mously repudiated by the older Churches. 

Hear Dr. Donald, of the Trinity Episcopal 
Church, Boston : "Why should the Episcopal 
Church be ready to affiliate with the remote 
Greek Church, of whose spirit and work so 
little is known in this country, while it refuses 
affiliation with American Presbyterians, Con- 
gregationalists, and Methodists? Why should 
the old Catholics receive a recognition and sym-' 
pathy withheld from Protestant bodies? Why 
should Pere Hyacinthe be received with open 
arms, while fellowship is refused to millions of 
162 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

American Baptists? The Greek Church prob- 
ably never gave the Episcopal Church in this 
country a single priest. The Presbyterian, 
Congregational, and Methodist Churches have 
given the Episcopal Church, bishops and 
clergy by the hundred. The religious and in- 
tellectual life of this country is largely identi- 
fied with the history of Congregationalism and 
Presbyterianism, and is largely in Congrega- 
tional and Presbyterian hands, and yet these 
Churches are held at a distance, while the 
Roman Church, not freed from the paganism 
of the Middle Ages, and the Greek Church, re- 
mote, inaccessible, and indifferent, are recog- 
nized as Christian brethren. What gives this 
state of things more significance is the fact that 
neither the Roman nor the Greek Church ac- 
knowledges the validity of the orders in the 
Anglican or American Churches, and that they 
refuse all affiliation. In other words, the Epis- 
copal Church of to-day, as represented by many 
of its leaders, stands aloof from the millions of 
163 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

American Christians who have made the his- 
tory of the country, founded and controlled its 
colleges, created its literature and largely 
shaped its development, and who are in warm 
sympathy with the Episcopal Church, while it 
holds out its hands to two Churches which will 
have nothing to do with it, which scorn its 
claims, and are themselves vitiated, in one form 
or another, with paganism. This is a very sin- 
gular situation." 

Then here is Dr. William R. Huntington, of 
Grace Church, with his "Talisman of Unity." 
Listen to him : "What is meant by Church 
Unity in the United States? Such unity, I 
answer, as unites the States themselves, namely, 
a unity so real that it can show indisputable 
tokens like the flag; vocal symbols such as the 
oath of office and the declaration of allegiance; 
personal agents of administration, such as gov- 
ernors and magistrates; a simple platform of 
belief upon which all stand ; and a general 
scheme of conduct to which those who are of 
164 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

the Commonwealth are expected to conform 
themselves. Such is unity as civilians under- 
stand it ; why should Churchmanship take up 
with any less thorough conception of what it 
means for a people to be one? How often we 
have heard it from the platforms of union meet- 
ings, interdenominational love-feasts, evangel 1 
ical alliances, and such like, the cry that God 
never meant His people to he one in any sense 
that would make their unity noticeable to the 
carnal eye; and that absolute unity of spirit 
ought to be accounted entirely compatible with 
infinite divisibility of body. But, if that con- 
tention be correct, what are we to make of those 
significant words of Christ in his great inter- 
cession for the Church, 'that they all may be 
one . . . that the world may believe that Thou 
hast sent me' ? 'The world,' we must remem- 
ber, looks on with carnal eyes. How is 'the 
world,' then, to discern a unity which has no 
tokens? 

Christendom is to-day moving upon hea- 

165 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

thendom with a zeal never before surpassed. 
But what of the methods and the strategy? 
Would you get the true answer to that 
question? Go not in search of it to the 
publications of the various missionary boards, 
go not to the missionary boards themselves, go 
not to the several legislative bodies. General 
Conventions, General Assemblies, and General 
Conferences which stand back of the boards, 
but go to the actual forces in the field, go to 
the men and women at the front ; they will tell 
you what the trouble is. They will tell you, 
and tell you with much warmth, that one of 
the chief hindrances to missionary progress is 
denominational rivalry — not rivalry there, but 
rivalry here, not a spirit of competition and 
eagerness for the preeminence among the mis- 
sionaries themselves, but a spirit of competi- 
tion and eagerness for the preeminence among 
Secretaries, Boards, Conventions and Commit- 
tees in these United States. Once let American 
Christianity begin marching upon the heathen 
1 66 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

stronghold with that unity of method which 
the Sirdar showed in marching on Khartoum, 
and we shall see results worth scoring. 

But marvellous as would be the consequences 
abroad, the practical effect of Church Unity 
here at home would be more signal still. It 
has lately been stated on high authority that 
less than one-half of the people of this country 
acknowledge allegiance to-day to any form of 
organized Christianity. Only a month ago, I 
heard the Superintendent of Schools of one of 
our largest cities quoted as having said that 
in the municipality which he represented, there 
were more than a hundred thousand children 
of school age who did not know of the existence 
of such a book as the Bible. 

What are the most formidable of the ob- 
stacles that block the way? They are these, 
putting the least important first and the most 
important last : Vested rights of property, 
deeds of gift, inherited trusts, and the like; 
then, on another level, traditional rivalries, the 
167 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

transmitted animosities and antagonisms oi 
other generations, and scores of burning ques- 
tions, which have been acknowledged burnt out, 
years ago, had not a mistaken sense of duty to 
ancestors forbidden." 

What unquestionable, momentous realities — 
how well portrayed ! 

Reading this, and knowing the exalted char- 
acter and rare attainments of Dr. Huntington, 
as well as his usual superiority to denomination- 
al fetters, the sanguine apostle of Organized 
Christianity, like the mistaken Samuel as to 
Eliab the son of Jesse, would be likely to ex- 
claim : "Surely the Lord's anointed is before 
Him !" Alas not so ! Instead of highest en- 
thusiasm for Organized Christianity, for New 
Testament Ends and Means, Dr. Huntington 
presents instead the melancholy plan of a uni- 
versal Episcopal Church, mainly on the ground 
of its being on a plane sufficiently low to ac- 
commodate the "Puritan," and theHigh Church- 
man with his "ritualistic excesses," both at once 
1 68 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

— this too when all the laws and facts of the 
situation unmistakably proclaim, that when 
there comes to the now lethargic Church a re- 
vival of conscience and heaven-inspired fires of 
zeal for truth and life, there can be between 
these parties no abiding peace but in disruption. 

One of the English Bishops, "at his recent 
diocesan conference, speaking of the Church at 
large, expressed his fear that the different 
schools (high and low) of the Church, were 
not likely to give way to or tolerate each other ; 
and that unless the mercy of God interposed, 
the Church could not live much longer, but 
must go to pieces and perish. He could not 
see the approaching death of such a grand old 
Church, as the Episcopal Church of England, 
without deep sorrow." 

Again the unwonted quality and quantity of 
sectarian pride rife with Episcopalians, is curi- 
ously and strikingly manifest in their con- 
temptuous treatment of Reformed Episcopa- 
lians. With these, grace, truth, power, the law 
169 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

arid love of Christ, the tokens of the Holy 
Spirit's presence, personal holiness indwelling, 
redemption zeal outreaching — all things of 
Bible Christianity which please God and bless 
men, appear in fully as clear and unquestion- 
able exhibition as anywhere in the old Church. 

Then, moreover, here are Episcopalians and 
the "Apostolic Succession" — all things one 
would say for the highest zeal in warmest 
Christian fellowship. But in fact denomina- 
tional Pride in the old Church is rebuked in 
the existence and teaching of ihe new, and the 
Pride angrily responds, and the Churches are 
conspicuously alienated. 

Of course Episcopalian sectarians are no ex- 
ception in the characteristic results of denomi- 
national regulations and conditions at the gates 
of entrance — by which man's little things are . 
made to triumph over God's great things. By 
their regulations and practices, the administra- 
tion result is that without, stand rejected the 
most surely accredited children of God, in clo- 
170 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sest fellowship with God and enjoying the full- 
est testimony that they please God, while with- 
in, entirely at home and warmly welcomed and 
not always inconspicuous, are multitudes, with- 
out one element of Christian experience in evi- 
dence, and who in sentiments and life, are sep- 
arated from the utterly worldly by the very 
faintest discrimination. 

But what of the Methodists? Are they 
chargeable with a Denominational Pride of 
creed opinion, which hinders their swinging 
promptly into line of Organized Christianity 
on the basis of the prescribed liberties and ex- 
actions of the New Testament? 

It is said of Wesley that in defining a Metho- 
dist as "not a man distinguished by his opin- 
ions, not a man distinguished by his usages, 
not a man distinguished by any ordinary mark 
of behavior," but as distinctively and emphat- 
ically a Christian, he wrote, "If some men say, 
Why, these are only common, fundamental 
principles of Christianity by which you would 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

distinguish a Methodist, thou hast said, so I 
mean : this is the very truth. I know they are, 
and I would to God both thou and all men 
should know, that I and all who follow my 
judgment, do vehemently refuse to be distin- 
guished from other men by any other than the 
common principles of Christianity." Yes, and 
at the present day, this is very nearly descrip- 
tive of them. In fact the matter of Arminian- 
ism and Calvinism is practically left discretion- 
ary with its ministers and members now, albeit 
in any disappearance of Methodism in Organ- 
ized Christianity a clear announcement that 
within evangelical limits doctrinal views were 
discretionary might not be superfluous. Then 
the Methodist is quite addicted to his denomi- 
nation because it is "Methodist," not because 
of anything in which it is very radically differ- 
entiated from pure and simple Christianity, but 
because he is accustomed to his Christianity in 
the garb and with the superficial specialties of 
Methodism, to which he has become attached 
172 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and of which very likely not a little proud. 
Still let a new wave of heaven-inspired enthu- 
siasm for the "Name which is above every 
name" — for Christianity in its four Means for 
its four Ends, roll over into his neighborhood, 
the Methodist would be found an easy convert 
to and very much at home in an organized New 
Testament Church. He could be counted upon 
as a Christian, and not hopelessly mortgaged 
to his Denominational Pride of Opinion. 

But what is to be said — what predicted — of 
the spiritual commonwealths which are thus 
hopelessly and wilfully mortgaged? Not only 
the voice of Bible prophet, but the voices — the 
admonishing voices of all human history are 
continually heard : "Let the potsherd strive 
with the potsherds of the earth, but woe unto 
him that striveth with his Maker!" The ques- 
tion is, with the Church so criminally divided 
and delinquent, and the upturned faces of 
earth's weary and wretched millions so piteous- 
ly, though blindly, appealing to a merciful 
+ 73 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Heaven and Christ's redemption love, and 
Christ and all Heaven so urgent for the glad 
coming of the Kingdom, the question for us 
is : Has God, in this beginning of the twentieth 
century, taken "the field" and is God now 
"inarching on ?" 

Fifty years ago in the cause of human liberty 
and uplift, God was "marching on." The peo- 
ple of the Southern States, however, steadfastly 
refused to believe it, and in a universal self- 
complacency in existing institutions and loftiest 
pride of political and religious opinion, first 
ignored and then fought the heavenly crusade. 
But God marched on, and the tragic, story of 
the penalties of that pride has never been, can 
never be told. 

There is now for the Church indeed no pro- 
phetic forecast of "battle of the warrior, and. 
confused noise, and garments rolled in blood," 
but there is prophetic forecast of unwelcomed 
but radical, disintegrating but finally, most 
beneficent revolution in human institutions, 
174 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

until New Testament decrees for New Testa- 
ment Christianity are fulfilled. 

Any one who candidly reads the New Testa- 
ment and noting its supreme urgencies, then 
examines the Church and surveys the world, 
and finally studies the "signs of the times," can 
scarcely fail to perceive that Christianity is 
soon to be organized and in due season trium- 
phant, and that if men and institutions fail of 
its principles and grace within, while neglect- 
ing its transcendent mission without, ecclesias- 
tical revolution will surely follow. And we 
may well ask: Is it now at the doors? Yes, 
there is every reason to believe that even now 
"God is marching on," and woe, woe, woe 
unto the organizations and the men, that in 
Pride of human opinion or attachments, ob- 
struct the march! 



175 



CHAPTER IV 

But "what is the interpretation of the 
thing?" Is there nothing deeper than this sim- 
ple Pride of creed opinion, which with us is 
making for divisions ? Let us see. Let us now 
commission and then for light, follow up a 
young reporter-lawyer, a keen, intellectual, 
emancipated, honest, modern student of twen- 
tieth century piety, aiming at "the truth, the 
whole truth, and nothing but the truth" — and 
apt to discern it. At the outset, he commits to 
memory and installs in the throne-room of his 
intelligence, Mr. Gladstone's saying, "The 
longer I live, the more I feel that Christianity 
does not consist in any particular system of 
church government or in any credal statement, 
but that Christianity is Christ." 

First in a general view he takes account of 
176 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Anglo-Saxon piety in Great Britain and in- 
spects the variegated and disputing Presby- 
terians of Scotland, and to a truly penetrating 
view, still more variegated and disputing Epis- 
copalians of England, and at once shocked and 
disappointed, cries and records, "All irrational 
humbug!" But he is mistaken. A goodly de- 
gree of sincerity and intelligence obtains in 
both Churches. 

He tries now the Episcopal Church in this 
country. He hears an officiating Bishop sol- 
emnly declare, "We bring you a grace that can 
be procured nowhere else," then in an interview 
proceeds to cross-examine the dignified witness. 
He finds that taking into view any land, 
any period, any parties, the Bishop is unable to 
point to a single factor of Christian life — holi- 
ness of character, heroic deeds, spiritual unity, 
Bible learning, Bible orthodoxy, redemption 
zeal, field successes — anything in, or up, or out 
— in an Episcopal individual or organization 
which the Reporter does not find fully matched 
17; 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

in a Presbyterian Church. Then he finds that 
his witness cannot charge upon another Church 
a single instance of ignorance or deadness or 
rancorous division or heterodoxy or rascality 
or corruption, that he cannot find a match for 
in the Episcopal Church, and that he can suc- 
cessfully defy the Bishop to point to any reali- 
ties whatever that indicate Heaven's special 
favor of Providence or Grace. Forcing thus 
the Bishop indirectly to confess that a "Club" 
is just as much to God and for God, as the 
"Church," he loses patience and declares: "It 
is all irrational humbug." But he is mistaken. 
The Bishop is perfectly sincere and somewhat 
intelligent. 

Now he investigates a Baptist, and taking 
for his starting proposition the Baptist minis- 
ter in Tennessee who wanted to baptise his sick 
child, when she was too ill to be immersed, and 
so sprinkled her, and was duly expelled from 
the ministry for the same, he asks, who, after 
this presumably godlv and faithful man was 

'i 7 8 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

cast out, remained. He found remaining and 
in good standing, none who had sprinkled any- 
body under any urgency of life or death, but 
any number who had no record whatever for 
grace or power in general, and as to other ordi- 
nances — the Lord's Supper, for example — no 
zeal as to the modes of it or for the Lord who 
instituted it, and looking now outside and now 
inside, he grows indignant and declares and 
records: "It is all irrational humbug!" But 
again he is mistaken. The Tennessee Baptist^ 
were conscientious and somewhat intelligent all 
the time. 

Next he takes in hand the Presbyterians. He 
reads Dr. Charles Hodge : 'The nearer we 
keep to the simple authoritative statements of 
God's Word, the firmer will be our faith, the 
more full and free our access to God, and the 
more harmonious and healthful our whole re- 
ligious experience. Such is the informing 
influence of such experience, when it is genu- 
ine; that is when really guided by the Spirit 
l 79 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and conformed to the revelation of God, that 
it effects a far nearer coincidence of views in 
all the children of God than the multiplicity of 
sects and conflicting systems of theology would 
lead us to imagine. The mass of true Chris- 
tians, in all denominations, get their religion 
directly from the Bible, and are but little af- 
fected by the peculiarities of their creeds. And 
even among those who make theology a study, 
there is often one form of doctrine for specu- 
lation, and another, simpler and truer, for the 
closet. Metaphysical distinctions are forgot in 
prayer, or under the pressure of real conviction 
of sin, and need of pardon and of divine as- 
sistance. Hence it is that the devotional writ- 
ings of Christians agree far nearer than their 
creeds. It may be taken for granted that that 
mode of stating divine truth which is most in 
accordance with the devotional language of 
true Christians, which best expresses those 
views which the soul takes when it appropriates 
1 80 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

the doctrines of the gospel for its own spiritual 
emergencies, is the truest and the best." 

Reading this and recalling Dr. Hodge's grief 
and pathetic tears, years ago in the General 
Assembly at Albany, because as he lamented 
there was "to be hereafter no more Old School 
Presbyterian Church" — when, in fact, not one 
member in a thousand and not one elder in 
twenty could have told, between Old and New. 
the difference, and which to-day, to ninety-nine 
ministers out of a hundred, would be a serious 
problem — while no man to-day in any sphere 
pretends that any loss or evil resulted from the 
union. Thus reading and recalling, our re- 
porter-lawyer again records "What irrational 
humbug!" and is again mistaken. Dr. Charles 
Hodge was ever "clear as crystal" in sincerity 
and in spiritual and intellectual power, not only 
"honorable among the thirty" of Israel, but of 
the "three," and not only of the ''three," but 
like Abishai, "chief among the three," in his 
181 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

day, as might be said, the First American 
Christian ! 

Then our investigator calls in Princeton upon 
Drs. Patton and Warfield. He hears the for- 
mer say : "It is quite true that the doctrines 
that Christians hold in common are more im- 
portant than those which separate them. But 
the way to conserve that which is common to 
all is for each to be jealous of the doctrine that 
is peculiar to itself. Defend the outposts if you 
wish to defend the citadel." And knowing that 
the true "citadel" includes in its strategic and 
all comprehensive scope every appointed ele- 
ment of spiritual light and power anywhere on 
the field, and that "each jealous of the doctrine 
peculiar to itself" means thirty rival parties in 
self-indulgence jealous of each other — thirty 
Pauls, Apolloses, and Cephases on the pro- 
scribed circumference of the circle at the center 
of which, all sufficient "for all things," Christ 
reigns as "Head over all things to the Church," 
he records again, "What irrational humbug!" 
182 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Next Dr. Warfield : Our Reporter listens 
as he identifies Christianity and Calvinism and 
says : "In proportion as we are religious, in 
that proportion are we Calvinistic, and when re- 
ligion comes fully to its rights in our thinking, 
and feeling and doing, then shall we be truly 
Calvinistic. Calvinism is not merely the hope 
of true religion in the world, it is true religion 
in the world — as far as true religion is in the 
world at all" ; and then corners him by asking 
him to name a single Christian man of any 
place or age, who, intelligent and spiritual and 
fired with passion for Christ, and truth, and 
love for God and man, yet failed in general or 
failed in comparison with any Calvinist who 
ever lived, in any respect of the Christian re- 
ligion. Dr. Warfield, he somewhat heatedly 
affirms, mistakes the "fat" of Calvinism for 
the ''vitality' 1 of Christianity, and again records 
— "More irrational humbug!" and is again mis- 
taken. Drs. Patton and Warfield are most sin- 
cere, scholarly, thoughtful and able men, 

18;, 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

But "what is the interpretation of the 
thing?" Reviewing his investigations, and 
much perplexed thereabout and a little sus- 
pecting himself and a good deal suspecting 
some occult element in the business, our re- 
porter-lawyer takes to studying Biases and 
Prejudices. This leads him to read and quote 
Bacon. Bacon taught a lesson much forgotten 
and much needed in these later days — that to 
reason reliably upon facts or principles, a man 
must first of all cast out his interior "idols" — 
"idols of the tribe," that is dominating biases 
common to all men ; "idols of the cave," that is 
dominating biases which belong to an indi- 
vidual; "idols of the forum/' that is dominating 
biases which come from environment; "idols 
of the theatre," that is dominating biases estab- 
lished and maintained by tradition. And in a 
Novum Organum note Dr. Thomas Fowler 
says : "The proneness of the mind to rest in 
first principles [impressions?], however ob- 
tained and to resent any examination of them 
184 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

is due mainly to a combination of pride with 
mental indolence. We recoil from the trouble 
of reviewing what lies at the bottom of so many 
of our beliefs, and we are too proud to acknowl- 
edge that we have been so long and so frequent- 
ly in error. To a certain extent also it may be 
accounted for by the principle of association. 
We have ourselves repeated or heard the maxim 
repeated by others so frequently and in con- 
nection with so many other propositions that 
Ave accept as true, that we can hardly conceive 
it being called in question." 

Much to the same intent is Pascal : "We 
must not mistake ourselves, we have as much 
that is automatic in us as intellectual, and hence 
it comes that the instrument by which persua- 
sion is brought about, is not demonstration 
alone. How few things are demonstrated ! 
Proofs can only convince the mind; custom 
makes our strongest proofs and those which 
we hold most firmly, it sways the automaton, 
which draws the unconscious intellect after it. 

185 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

... It is custom that convinces us, custom that 
makes so many men Christians, custom that 
makes them Turks, heathen, artisans, soldiers." 

Says Tyndall : "The desire to establish or 
to avoid a certain result can so warp the mind 
as to destroy its power of estimating facts." 
Says Beecher : "Our real commentators are 
our strongest traits of character; and we usual- 
ly come out of the Bible with all those texts 
sticking to us which our idiosyncrasies attract." 
Says an English physician of his town : "I had 
not been in it a month before I discovered that 
while education affects the heads of the people, 
and penetrates those only a little way, the old 
traditions are of their hearts, only to be driven 
out by generations of patient teaching." 

Says Mark Twain in "A Connecticut Yan- 
kee in King Arthur's Court" : "Inherited 
ideas are a curious thing and interesting to ob- 
serve and examine. I had mine, the king and 
his people had theirs. In both cases they flowed 
in ruts worn deep by time and habit, and the 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

man who should have proposed to divert them 
by reason or argument would have had a long 
contract on his hands." 

So Drs. George B. Cheever and Charles S. 
Robinson. Says the former : "The effect of pre- 
judice and doubt upon our first ideas of truth, 
that are deposited in the mind to germinate into 
life by a childlike faith, may be illustrated from 
physiology by the experiment of varnish on an 
egg. Eggs varnished cannot be hatched, be- 
cause they have been hermetically sealed and iso- 
lated from what might be called the air and 
life pulsations. The mother hen might sit upon 
them with all requisite constancy, but the em- 
bryo will not germinate into life with the var- 
nish on the shell. The air cannot pass through 
the envelope, and there is, consequently, no life, 
but after a little while, death. Such is the 
Stirling effect of prejudice and doubt upon the 
germs of truth, even in minds the most active." 
And the latter, after quoting "the shrewd and 
weighty aphorism" of Goethe, "As are one's 

187 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

inclinations so are his opinions," says : "Any 
vigorous man's views of difficult points of doc- 
trine are largely swayed and eventually fixed by 
his own personality. Human decision depends 
less upon logic, and more upon life. Most men 
choose their intellectual position, and take their 
practical stand, under the powerful — although 
often unconscious — pressure of temperament, 
education, and taste; as each 'thinketh in his 
heart, so is he.' " 

And now the "lawyer" in the reporter takes 
account of this significant newspaper comment : 
"It is only just to mention that the decision was 
not unanimous, and that Chief Justice Fuller, 
of Illinois, Mr. Justice White, of Louisiana, 
and Mr. Justice Peckham, of New York, voted 
against the constitutionality of the Sherman 
Anti-trust law; but it is not often that a de- 
cision, even in the Supreme Court, can be ren- 
dered entirely free from political bias. We do 
not mean that such distinguished Democrats as 
those we have mentioned would consciously al- 
188 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

low party considerations to influence them in 
forming" their opinions — far from it; our Su- 
preme Court is composed of men above even 
the suspicion that such would be the case. But 
there remains an unconscious influence that 
will affect even the most intelligent and upright 
men, and no man can get away from it" ; and 
recalls that in the Hayes-Tilden presidential 
controversy of 1877, of the Electoral Commis- 
sion without exception, Democratic Supreme 
Court Justices A r oted on the Democratic side, 
and the Republicans on the Republican side. 
Furthermore, he remembers that before i860 
and "the war," all the thinkers and reasoners 
and conscientious men and women, equally with 
the mercenary and selfish and ignorant, 
were pro-slavery advocates — authors, teachers, 
judges, statesmen, ministers, bishops — all ! 

The investigator concludes his steadily en- 
larging and at last, immense appreciation of 
biases and prepossessions by observing and 
chronicling two convincing illustrations far 
180 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

apart in terrestrial location, and as far apart in 
social and moral location. He reads : "Until 
very recently there existed in India the remains 
of a religious sect called Thugs. Less than a 
century ago they numbered thousands of mem- 
bers. They were worshipers of the goddess 
Kali, and it was their belief that they should 
murder inoffensive people in honor of Kali. 
They had their rules and rites of murder, hand- 
ed down from father to son. They worked in 
bands, and under all possible disguises in- 
gratiated themselves into the confidence of trav- 
elers, and then strangled and buried them. 
Their victims numbered not less than thirty 
thousand a year. The British officers, who sup- 
pressed them, declared that many of them were 
gentlemen of conscientious life, cultivated and 
eminently respectable, who fully believed they 
were doing their duty, as they had been taught 
their religion from infancy. Some of them had 
the record of hundreds of murders. But they 
190 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

were not insane; they were simply victims of 
an erroneous belief as to duty.'' 

Then this from the Church Times: "It is 
useless to try to convince the English layman 
that the sacramental bread is or contains the 
body of Christ, by bluntly telling him so; but 
if we can induce him for a year or more to 
adore the bread, paying lowly reverence thereto, 
he will then find little difficulty in accepting the 
Catholic doctrine" ; which means that what you 
cannot introduce into the convictions of a man 
through his intelligence and reason, you can 
introduce through his acquired impressions and 
Biases ! 

Finally he recalls the often quoted saying of 
the Roman prelate, that if he can have exclusive 
control of the religious education of children 
until they are eight years old, he will take his 
chances on the coming years, and "rests." 

Taking leave now of our Reporter there re- 
main several things to record: i. The "irra- 
tional humbug" — (and no mistake about it this 
191 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

time) — of the derelict and laisscz faire senti- 
ment that earnest mutual debate between the 
denominations and uncomplimentary criticism 
from without, is not "in good form." 2. That 
denominational enthusiasm is largely a matter 
of self-gratification, of personal and corporate 
self-indulgence in coddling and celebrating 
Biases. 3. That for a True Church in the 
regulation unity and spirituality and efficiency, 
the plan must be that of Ends and Means as 
hereinbefore rudely sketched, and the power, 
the direct omnipotence of God Himself. Man 
can enlighten ignorance, convince the under- 
standing, give polarization to the reason and 
the judgment, and constrain the will — God 
alone, in a human heart, can dethrone or con- 
vert or banish a Bias ! For the casting out of 
the "Evil spirit" of a Bias, there is for the 
denominational sufferer but one available, one 
valid proposition — the same that in gospel days 
followed failure with omnipotence at the moun- 
tain base, "Bring him unto me!" 
192 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

At this point Dr. Charles Parkhurst can be 
fittingly and profitably heard : "It is urged that 
denominations have their grounds in the inevi- 
table differences that exist among men, it is 
sufficient to reply that those differences are no 
greater now than they were in the apostolic 
times when denominations had not yet begun to 
be thought of. There were the same essential 
incongruities and disparities as now ; the same 
differences in schooling and in the way of inter- 
preting Christ and truth; but none of these 
differences were felt to cut into the substance of 
the matter, and therefore introduced no jarring 
note into the Christian concord of the first fol- 
lowers of our Lord, i There was no proposition 
to have one church for the gifted disciples and 
another for the unschooled; one for the rich 
and another for the impecunious ; one for the 
Peters who could put their loyalty to Jesus in 
one form of confession, and another for the 
Thomases who found it a little difficult to 
phrase their loyalty to Jesus in quite the Petri ne 
193 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

form of declaration. It was with them all 
purely a matter of personal following, founded 
exclusively in the common commitment of 
themselves to their risen and ascended Lord. 
Consequently there could be but one church. 

No doubt the church did not long continue 
in that primitive condition. The instant a 
Christian ceases to be completely bound up in 
his divine Lord his regards begin to settle 
back into the channel of his own individual 
proclivities; and that is the genius of denomi- 
nation. Denomination is not made up of the 
essence, but of the accidents of Christianity. A 
denomination is another name for some single 
strand of personal eccentricity selected from 
each of a number of counterparts and tied up 
into one bundle. Methodism, Presbyterianism, 
Episcopacy, are each of them a dignified way 
of designating a temperamental idiosyncracy ; 
and when enough of either of these three stripes 
of idiosyncratics are brought together, the re- 
sult is a Methodist Church, or a Presbyterian 
194 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Church, or an Episcopal Church, as the case 
may be. That is the genius of the entire per- 
formance." 



i9S 



CHAPTER V 

Denominations now directly and at closer 
quarters : 

Years ago, illustrating the meanness of spir- 
itual dilatoriness, Mr. Beecher pictured the 
United States relief steamer anchoring in the 
harbor of the starving Irish and in thrilling 
passion of eloquence, voiced their fierce appeal 
of desperate hunger and distress: "Unload! 
unload! unload!" — this in what they did want. 
To-day great millions of both saints and sinners 
hungering for the bread of life, before the 
Christian Church, are heard in the same clam- 
orous imploring cry : "Unload ! unload ! un- 
load !" — but now in the things that they do 
not want. Discharge your pernicious cargo 
of "idols" and prejudices, your arms and ar- 
jg6 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

mor of denominational divisions ! — is their 
thought. 

Let us now at the outset, and in a prelimi- 
nary way, for a moment, notice of our present 
denominational segregation, two intolerable, 
although subordinate and apparently superfi- 
cial factors of administration. The one is 
heresy trials, the other, ministerial support. 

Whether a minister shall be within the en- 
closure of any particular denomination, or in 
one rather than another, is usually at the root 
of tilings, a matter of very little account, even 
to himself. In any event, life, liberty, pursuit 
of happiness or knowledge or usefulness or holi- 
ness are fully open to him. But in the very sim- 
ple matter of deciding a man's ecclesiastical 
location, denominational prosecutors, from the 
most preposterous codes of procedure, can as 
with an earthquake shake and disturb and dis- 
tress the entire Church, and open the way for 
the worldly and "yellow" Press gleefully to 
make the courts of incensed holiness "smell to 
197 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

heaven" in offence rank of disputation and acri- 
mony. And what is more, one man, one accu- 
ser out of his own idiosyncracies, or something 
worse, if shrewd and determined, can do it all. 

Church leaders in this country need enlight- 
enment and instruction from the Produce Ex- 
change. 

If here one member supposes another to be 
an offender, what does he do? He quietly ad- 
dresses the Committee of Complaints. If these 
decide that there is "none occasion nor fault, ,, 
the matter vanishes at once. If otherwise, the 
case is referred to the Committee of Arbitra- 
tion; a full hearing is accorded to all parties, 
and a decision rendered which settles the mat- 
ter forever, and not a ripple of agitation reaches 
the outside w r orld, or feeds the curiosity of the 
public or affects for an hour, the harmony and 
efficiency of the Exchange itself. Heaven and 
earth are calling upon Organized Christianity 
to rid denominationalism of "heresy trials" 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and to give a Church to be as judicially digni- 
fied as a Produce Exchange. 

The other factor, abundantly sufficient in it- 
self to warrant the most revolutionary abolition 
of denominations, appears in the matter of 
ministers' salaries, which on the average are 
less than seven hundred dollars a year. 

Does the American Public, do the American 
Editors, do the men of thought and conscience 
in the Churches themselves, realize what that 
means — what untold wrongs and injustice and 
excuseless meanness are reported in that simple 
statement ? 

Do the students of political economy, the 
writers of American history realize, what it is 
to have scattered through the communities, 
North, South, East and West, in a prosperous 
and enlightened country like ours, 150,000 men 
— cultivated, refined men, many with families 
like-minded — men who have spent seven years 
of special sacrifice and studious diligence for 
their calling, to which they have come and in 
199 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

which they are held simply by the noble desire 
to please God and bless men, and half of them 
living on less than seven hundred dollars a 
year? 

Suppose that "some deep-reaching and far- 
reaching organization of this world — the 
Standard Oil Company or Pennsylvania Rail- 
road Company for example — got into its re- 
lentless grasp tens of thousands of educated 
and cultivated men and then, by some sacred 
motive within to which they appealed, and by 
some compelling force without, which they ap- 
plied, held them there year after year, and dec- 
ade after decade of their prosperity — and pay- 
ing them on the average but seven hundred 
dollars a year — the dictionaries would be beg- 
gared of scornful words with which to de- 
nounce them in their disgraceful and hateful 
meanness ! 

And if anybody supposes that either the gen- 
erous manhood of intelligent and energetic 
Americans, or the just and compassionate God, 
200 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

"keeping watch above His own," is going to 
tolerate this gratuitous abomination on the part 
of denominational leaders — simply that they 
may be gratified in denominational attachments 
— on during the twentieth century, they are 
assuredly mistaken. They know not God or the 
signs of the times. 

But now of the denominations let us definite- 
ly remark that they are : 

i. Baseless and unscientific in constitution 
and segregation. 

2. According to their raison d'etre, endless 
in number. 

3. While not Scriptural or philosophical in 
theory, not feasible in operation at home or 
abroad. 

4. Objectionable, negatively, positively. 

5. By all the tokens of earth and heaven, 
doomed. 

Alike in press and pulpit, denominational 
apologists are forever telling us, with endless 
ingenuities of eloquence, that sectarian divi- 
201 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sions are inevitable because of the many-sided 
aspects of revealed truth and radical differences 
in mental constitutions. They tell us, "you 
cannot have organic unity because men cannot 
change their intelligent and conscientious con- 
victions." "Grounds for these denominational 
divergences are found in the very nature of 
man as he is constituted," they say. 

Addressing the Federation Convention, Hon. 
David J. Brewer, Justice of the United States 
Supreme Court, said : "Denominations exist, 
will exist and ought to exist. Their existence 
is in no manner inconsistent with the spirit of 
unity which should animate all. They only il- 
lustrate the great plan of the universe — unity 
in variety. Not one flower alone, but a count- 
less number, with differences of form, color 
and leaf, mantle the earth- during the summer 
days, yet a single thought of beauty pervades 
the whole floral world. No one mountain peak 
is like another in elevation, form, display of 
rock and forest, but all appeal to our sense of 
202 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

grandeur. There is a marked -apparent differ- 
ence between the falling of the leaf, the drop- 
ping of the aeronaut from his balloon and the 
stupendous majesty of Niagara's falling waters, 
yet all obey one law — the law of gravitation. 
Man, though made in the image of God, is of 
all creations the most varied and complex. No 
two faces are exactly alike. No two minds are 
identical in their processes and conceptions. 
The chords of feeling and passion in no two 
hearts are tuned to precisely the same key. Yet, 
notwithstanding the infinite variety, there is a 
manifest unity in face and mind and heart. So 
while differences of creed, in ideas of worship 
and governmental polity, separate the Chris- 
tian world into many denominations, all are 
united by a common devotion to a single Mas- 
ter. These various denominations, responding 
to the different wants of the human soul, make 
known in the language of the apostle 'the mani- 
fold wisdom of God.' " 

This is fine literature but very poor psychol- 
203 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ogy — if the Justice will permit us to say so. 
Of course in the exhibitions of nature and 
human nature, there is an evident and inter- 
esting variety. But for the human subject, in 
the hour and crisis of supreme action, his spe- 
cialties, unless they pertain directly and con- 
tributively to the urgent business in hand, ought 
to be and can be resolutely suppressed. If God 
calls for organized Christianity it is the Chris- 
tian's duty and privilege to curb and deny him- 
self in those elements of his being which mili- 
tate against it, even though they argue for a 
denomination. 

Our neighbors, the Life Saving men, may 
serve us for illustration in this respect. When 
there is "nothing doing," and "off duty," they 
are free to indulge their personal eccentricities, 
you see them here on the bay side, shooting or 
fishing, one in a skiff, one in a "sneak-box," 
one in a dory, one in a yawl, one in a canoe, 
one in a punt, one in a bateau. But let the 
cry, "a wreck in the offing" be resounded, do 
204 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

you see them now in "diversity" instead of 
''unity," in "variety" instead of "harmony," 
each "conscientiously adhering to what he per- 
sonally believes," in the "necessary divergences 
of human nature," painfully dragging across 
the beach, each the craft of his own personal 
idiosyncrasy and seven men in seven precarious 
"tubs," paddling to the rescue? Of course not. 
Now according to the law of the emergency, as 
determined alike by principles and experience, 
stringently interpreted and unanimously re- 
garded, in unity they meet the practical ends 
of the situation for themselves and others and 
in "organic unity" in one true life craft, with 
"one mind" dare and do. On the bay they 
might be denominationalists, on the ocean they 
must be Christians. Twentieth century believ- 
ers are on the ocean ! 

Look in upon this excited, surging, debating, 
bantering crowd of the New York Stock Ex- 
change. You have here, not only picturesque 
but measureless varieties of the genus homo. 
205 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

But when "on 'change" every possible, dearest 
element of personal idiosyncrasy is ruthlessly 
turned out of doors, if it at all interferes with 
negotiating securities. "This one thing I do" 
every man is crying, and suppressing every 
personal eccentricity which interferes with, or 
indeed does not contribute to his doing. 

In the general Church the diversified ele- 
ments of human nature neither justify nor ac- 
count for denominations, and if denominations 
did represent differing elements in human 
nature, they would not on that account be justi- 
fied. 

But we now advance to remark that our 
denominations do not represent essential ele- 
ments in human nature. What "differing wants 
of the human soul" are in fact met in our "vari- 
ous denominations"? Are there with us one 
hundred and forty-three "differing wants of the 
human soul"? "Differences of creed, ideas of 
worship and governmental policy" do "separate 
the Christian world into many denominations," 
206 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

no doubt, but how many of these differences 
of creed and ideas belong at all to fundamental 
and essential elements of human character? 
Are there one hundred and forty-three varieties 
of these essential elements? Suppose Justice 
Brewer had sounded even the thirty represent- 
atives of sectarian organization before him in 
the Federation Convention, would he have 
struck thirty "differing essential elements of 
human character," to match the denominations? 
What psychologist would accord thirty differ- 
ing essential elements of personal character to 
that Convention? Moreover, what Bible 
scholar would concede that there were thirty 
Scriptural, vital, cardinal dogmas represented 
there? Any searcher sounding deeply and 
keenly would have disclosed thirty different 
biases, no doubt, but not thirty sets of endowed, 
intellectual, conscientious, emancipated, spirit- 
ual, affiliated reasoners. 

Another illustration in this regard would 
seem to be furnished by Dr. Benjamin B. War- 
207 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

field. He writes : "Interfused and interpene- 
trated and governed by the one God, united by 
one baptism, symbolizing one faith to the one 
Lord, called in one calling, by the one Spirit, 
into one body : here we have the Apostle's con- 
ception of the Church's unity and its ground, 
a unity consistent with any diversity of gifts — 
with diversity in everything, in fact, except true 
Christianity. 

If this study of the nature and relations of 
the conception of Christian unity as it lies in 
the New Testament has any validity, we can- 
not but be aided by it in our search for unity 
now. It is clear, for instance, that : We are 
not to seek it in the inclusion of all Christians 
in one organization and under one government. 
A story is told of a man who, wishing a swarm 
of bees, caught every bee that visited his flow- 
ers and enclosed them together in a box, only to 
find the difference between an aggregation and 
a hive. We cannot produce unity by building a 
great house over a divided family. Different 
208 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

denominations have a similar right to exist with 
separate congregations, and may be justified on 
like grounds." 

Of course "diversity in everything in fact, 
except true Christianity," yes, and organization 
accordingly. Why not "the inclusion of all 
Christians in one organization and under one 
government" ? Where in its "validity" does 
the New Testament forbid or discourage this? 
Evidently Dr. Warfield would have us believe 
that there is an element in human nature such, 
that when men are brought together in or- 
ganization as Christians, they become "bees" 
and mutually sting or are necessarily idle and 
worthless — an "aggregation," while if they 
come together in one of the multitudinous sec- 
tarian organizations, they are harmonious, lov- 
ing, cooperative and efficient — a "hive !" 

Years ago in Princeton Seminary there were 

young men of different denominations — not 

only Presbyterians, but Methodists, Baptists, 

Congregationalists and Episcopalians. In the 

209 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

closest daily fellowship, they studied the truth, 
developed in spiritual character, and put on the 
armor of a future ministry, with no saving ele- 
ment of denominationalism in the situation at 
all. Were they antagonistic "bees," and only 
an "aggregation'' of stinging enmity? 

The young men went to Northfield and to- 
gether prosecuted — excepting ceremonial rites 
— everything religious, before Christ and with 
Christ and in the power and demonstration of 
the Spirit; and with no element of denomina- 
tionalism to sanctify and correct things either. 
Were they in fact an "aggregation" of irrec- 
oncilable "bees"? They attended Y. M. C. A. 
Conventions occasionally and Y. M. C. A. 
services constantly ; with no denominationalism 
to redeem, counteract, conserve. Were they 
"bees, "-"busy" with acrimony and animosities D 

Now at length invited to Organized Chris- 
tianity for the Ends and Means of Christianity, 
under the one banner of Christ, to whom, with 
whom, while they seek His grace, they live — 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

does Dr. Warfield imagine that thus brought 
together, even though bereft of denomination- 
alism, they will become an "aggregation" of 
buzzing, warring "bees"? 

When the Corinthian Christians were sum- 
moned to quit their sectarian divisions of 
"Paul" and "Apollos" and "Cephas" and unite, 
organize, cooperate under Christ the "Head," 
were they invited to an "aggregation" and a 
"bee" battle? 

Justice Brewer says "Denominations exist, 
will exist and ought to exist." They do exist — 
quite too true — but whether they now ought to 
exist, or in the approaching day's of the Coming 
of the Kingdom, they will exist, depends upon 
whether they are philosophical and Scriptural ! 
Are they? 

One thing is evident, the different Churches 
do habitually forego and surrender the "intel- 
ligent and conscientious convictions," in creed, 
worship and government, which they so re- 
ligiously vaunt before others, and without, 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

when constrained by some considerations of 
advantage, within. 

The Bishops of the Episcopal Church, in pre- 
senting the "Quadrilateral" basis of Church 
Unity, offered to give up everything distinctive, 
but their "figment" of "apostolic succession." 
The Princeton Seminary professors used to ad- 
vise their graduates to freely settle in Congre- 
gational Churches — thus giving up the whole 
matter of Church Government, in order that 
into New England might be introduced the Au- 
gustinian theology. 

In a sense, the Presbyterian Church foregoes 
all its denominational specialties and conducts 
within itself "Organized Christianity," in its 
splendid Women's work. Having as Chris- 
tians, at their first uniting with the Church, ac- 
cepted the Bible and its Theism and Heroism, 
its Christian women, without any doctrinal or 
ecclesiastical pledge whatever, at home and 
abroad, live and teach and preach the gospel 
with magnificent fidelity and success — like Paul 
212 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

— "preaching the Kingdom of God and teach- 
ing those things which concern the Lord Jesus 
Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding." 

But if there is neither Scripture nor intelli- 
gence in the denominational pretence, what is 
the determining principle which obtains for and 
in the various segregations? There is none. 
Narrowing now our investigations to the thir- 
ty, we shall see that the denominational motto 
is: "Anything, anywhere, anyhow!" — any 
mere notion at the determining station, no mat- 
ter what the results ! 

To quote from the Westminster: "Orthodoxy 
as man sees it, is largely in matter of locality. 
We know three churches that stand side by 
side in the same little hamlet. In one it is 
orthodox not to vote, in the other not to sing 
hymns, and in the other to fall from grace. 
They are all made up of good people, and dwell 
in perfect unity except on Sundays." 

Twenty years ago, before the most urgent 
needs in, and splendid opportunities for, all 
213 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sunny but yet beclouded Italy, the Waldensian 
and Free Churches furnished this suggestive 
record : 'The question of union between the 
two Churches is not a settled one. The point 
of disagreement is the name: the one would 
have it 'The Evangelical Church of Italy.' the 
other, 'The Evangelical Waldensian Church.' " 
"I fear from my knowledge of the parties that 
practically the matter for the present is ended," 
regretfully writes the Rev. John R. McDougall. 
We read : "A good many negroes of Boston 
are affiliating with a new sect which has sprung 
up there recently. The society teaches baptism 
by immersion, the drinking of water instead of 
wine at Communion, the taking of unleavened 
bread for sacrament, the washing of feet, the 
saluting of members with a kiss, breathing on 
the head to impart the Holy Ghost, and the 
keeping of Saturday as the Sabbath, instead of 
Sunday. The sect styles itself 'the Church of 
the Living God' and 'the Saints of Christ.' The 
minister who is propagating the new faith an- 
214 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

nounces : T call all men liars who do not be- 
lieve as we do' " — not a bad photograph of 
denominationalism. 

But for very weak human nature — very pow- 
erful for division, on the premises of Christ — 
let us look now in an entirely different quarter, 
and here are the Southern Churches, kept in 
separation decade after decade, simply by a 
venerable but childish grudge, forty years old. 
Oh, yes — for the Presbyterians — we know 
about the Spring resolutions, and the Hodge 
protest, and the secession, and the, for a while, 
annual Northern resolutions, and the rejected 
-advances, and the Johnson "rider" and the in- 
effectual Hamlin resolutions. We also know- 
that for thirty years there has been in the North 
no feeling or expression reflecting at all upon 
the Christian Character and doctrinal sound- 
ness of the South. And we also know that if 
the two parties were together for an hour as 
Christians, and one gleam of the eternal reali- 
ties flashed upon the common conscience, and 
215 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

one glance at sin and salvation taken from 
heaven's point of view, and one flashlight vision 
of a Christian's emergencies of situation and 
commission, accorded, and one "clear call" 
from the other world, one reiteration from the 
skies of the imperative, "Forgive one another, 
even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven 
you," there would be on the spot "one fold" 
under "one Shepherd" in ten minutes. But in 
fact for the Church, the banner inscription of 
division, still floats on the Southern breezes, 
"Anything, anywhere, anyhow." 

Not so for the world, however. Thus writes 
Dr. Henry M. Wharton: "It is not pleasant 
to be reminded of any disagreeable circum- 
stances, and yet one can hardly pass unnoticed 
the fact, that between the great sections, North 
and South, which were engaged in bloody war. 
a few years ago, the only unreconciled people 
are the Christians. How painful it is to read 
of the Northern and Southern Baptists ! the 
Northern and Southern Methodists ! the North- 
216 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ern and Southern Presbyterians ! Even the old 
soldiers who fought each other to the very 
death, are warm and cordial friends, having 
forever buried all enmity of the past. I am 
an ex-Confederate soldier myself, and yet in 
the last few years have made no less than three 
speeches for the Grand Army men on their 
Memorial occasions, and could not have been 
more hospitably entertained by my own com- 
rades of the South." 

Dr. Talmage after enumerating forty-three 
Protestant denominations, and adding, "and 
many other denominations more in number 
than I have mentioned," says : "These are 
more or less absurdly cut up into a great ec- 
clesiastical hash, with enough salt of real grace 
to keep it, and enough pepper of biting con- 
troversy to spice it, but nevertheless hash. 
With some it is a question of robes; with some 
a question of days ; with some a question about 
non-essentials so small that the theologian has 
to get out his dictionary to find them." 
217 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Yes, non-essentials "small" indeed — yet 
large enough to inaugurate and perpetuate to 
an incredible degree "graceless organization." 

To quote again the Westminster: "A doc- 
trine, the belief or rejection of which makes one 
neither better nor worse, cannot be of especial 
importance in the sight of God. And yet 
Churches divide on just such lines as these. In 
a world where millions have never heard of 
Christ, vast fortunes are expended every year 
for no purpose than to perpetuate graceless 
organization." This on the sacred premises 
where the voice of New Testament truth is for- 
ever resounding, "Nothing, ever, anywhere, 
anyhow, that interferes with or does not con- 
tribute to, the headship of Christ and the Holy 
Spirit's operations in human hearts !" 

Again, if the existing denominations are 
scientifically founded and necessary, then there 
are grounds and necessity for ten times more. 
An interminable catalogue of them is called for 
— by the basis — the rationale of what we have. 
218 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

The sectarian apologist says, ''Our denomina- 
tions are natural, necessary, inevitable." All 
the while, however, he is unconsciously talking 
about his own, and to excuse his own self- 
gratification, is constrained to concede the same 
to others. How many others? 

According to Dr. Wrangemanri, there are 
in Frankfort four, and in Hesse-Darmstadt five 
congregations of "Separate" Lutherans, hold- 
ing no communion with each other, besides 
Lutherans not "Separate." Why not forty or 
fifty as well as four or five? 

Says a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. 
Robert Johnston : ''We are anxious above all 
things to avoid in the new provinces that over- 
lapping of church life which is so common in 
the other districts. For example, there is in 
the Province of Quebec, a town of five thou- 
sand inhabitants, of whom four thousand five 
hundred are Roman Catholics, ministered to by 
one church. The remaining five hundred are 
219 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

served by five different denominations." Why 
only five? 

If Baptists, whose specialty is baptism, are 
necessary, so are Communists with a specialty 
in the Lord's Supper, as much — and so on 
through all the ordinances and rites. There is 
no root reason in the world why there should 
not be Calvanistic Methodists, Congregation- 
alists and Baptists, in ecclesiastical separation 
from Arminians of the same sects. If a Pres- 
byterian will not affiliate with a Christian who 
votes, because the Bible deprecates "the King- 
doms of this world," there is no reason why 
he should not separate himself from a Christian 
who has education or wealth, because the Bible 
deprecates the wisdom and riches of this world. 
There is just as much Scriptural ground for 
public prayers from Psalms only as there is for 
public praises from Psalms only. 

If in worship a man would separate himself 
in favor of prescribed prayers, there are equal- 
ly valid reasons why he should separate himself 
220 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

in favor of prescribed sermons. In one case 
the minister addresses God in behalf of men; 
in the other he addresses men in behalf of God. 
The Old School Presbyterian Church once 
separated from the New. A division of the 
Old School Church itself on the Premillenarian 
issue, would have been far more dignified and 
philosophical. 

Dr. Guthrie tells of a man and his wife, the 
only survivors of various splits in a Baptist 
chapel. "I might," he says, "have raised a 
controversy between man and wife and split 
them." No doubt, and he would have been 
correctly denominational if he had. The logic 
and criteria of present denominations call for 
scores of others in addition. 

But if the present denominational diagram 
is not theoretically scientific in either its for- 
mulations or its enumerations, no more is it 
practically feasible. 

Visit a town of five thousand population. 
Its "Daughter of Zion" will be reeling under a 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

load of six denominational Churches. But if 
now denominationalism be essential and in- 
evitable, she has got to stagger along some- 
how under the burden of at least twenty-four 
more. "Well, let the full exploitation of de- 
nominational Christianity be reserved for the 
very large towns that can accommodate it." 
But is that either fair or Scriptural? Is the 
Christian plan of "many denominations all 
united by a common devotion to a single Mas- 
ter, responding to the different wants of the 
human soul, and making known the manifold 
wisdom of God" to be prosecuted only in the 
very largest towns — especially when after all, 
none of them will be large enough and even 
"the world itself could not contain" the endless 
category ? 

Suppose that during the session of the Fed- 
eration Convention delegates from a large town 
in a hitherto forgotten region, hearing that 
Christianity was necessarily and appropriately 
represented in denominationalism, had applied 

222 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

to the Convention as such, for ministers to 
come and organize and administer New Testa- 
ment Christianity. Either the Convention has 
got to send thirty men or none, acknowledging 
that denominationalism cannot represent — can- 
not prosecute Christianity, which is indeed the 
deplorable fact. 

Six men in the name of denominationalism 
go out for Christianity to Japan. "What is 
your basis of organization and are you all 
here?'' the astute and investigating little men 
will ask. "We represent ideal Christianity; 
we are six out of thirty ; with us 'many denomi- 
nations all united by a common devotion to a 
single Master, respond to the different wants 
of the human soul and thus make known the 
manifold wisdom of God,' and twenty-four 
more are due to arrive and apply at any time, 
only we crowded on a little in advance of the 
others." So they replied, and when they could 
not guarantee that if they were admitted and 
accommodated, twenty-four more would not 
223 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

immediately appear, the "heathen in his blind- 
ness" declined them all, and said : "You made 
in this business a great mistake in strategy. 
You first sent over your New Testament, and 
we already know the Ends and Means of Chris- 
tianity and the story of 'Paul and Apollos and 
Cephas/ and we send you all home to ponder 
the New Testament question of the apostle, 'Is 
Christ divided?' " 

Some one says, "Japan demurs at thirteen 
kinds of Presbyterians, and sixteen kinds of 
Methodists and many Baptist religions, and 
says : 'First decide among yourselves which 
one is right — then come to Japan.' " Even so. 

A most suggestive and ominous and indeed 
critical situation is disclosed by the Student 
Volunteer Conventions. In general the twenty- 
five hundred young men, representing thirty 
denominations, have belonged to Young Men's 
Christian Associations and together as Chris- 
tians, at exceedingly close quarters, have sought 
and found every treasure of New Testament 
224 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

piety. Soon they face the "field which is the 
world" to go forth as missionaries. If now 
denorninationalism belongs essentially to Chris- 
tianity, they must go in thirty rival divisions, 
from thirty home societies, to establish and 
maintain thirty separate missions. What an 
astounding spectacle is here presented — twenty- 
five hundred educated men full of fiery and in- 
telligent and heaven-inspired enthusiasm for 
the heaven-appointed Ends of Christianity ! 
Not only from their Bibles but from a manifold 
experience in Young Men's Societies, they have 
learned the Means and how to employ them. 
Now at the momentous crisis of their glad 
career, Church leaders, out of an Egyptian 
bondage to what they are used to, taken captive 
for and by their religious self-indulgence, come 
forth to dictate — "You must go forth as de- 
nominationalists !" 

Those who have eyes to see can see, that 
soon — thus commissioned, while the young 
225 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

men will not go, and the nations will not receive 
them — God will not send them ! 

Furthermore, denominations are objection- 
able. They lack Scriptural and rational foun- 
dation, are logically numberless, and actually 
ridiculously numerous. The propositions upon 
which they rest and the plans which they pro- 
pose are not feasible, and they are besides dis- 
tinctly objectionable — and this on the domain 
of always protesting, and always sufficient 
Christianity. 

In the first place, sectarianism fails in ethics 
— in Christian altruism. As already indicated 
in such a convocation as the Federation Con- 
vention of 1905, it reaches the summit of its 
possibilities. Here at the best it can do, the 
noblest it can show, are the representatives of 
thirty denominations all equally expressing "a 
common devotion to a single Master 1 ' and "the 
manifold wisdom of God." In the convention 
do the six representatives of six leading de- 
nominations for instance, plan then and there, 
226 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and afterward and elsewhere, to move up and 
make room for the remaining twenty-four? 
Out in the towns, do the six already on the 
ground ever come together to see if somehow 
room cannot be found for and accorded to a 
seventh or eighth or ninth — not to speak of 
the twenty-one others? 

To quote the Rev. John Woodruff Conklin : 
"You and I know of a town of sixteen hundred 
people. If any one of us ministers, presum- 
ably fairly sound in mind and body, were called 
to the pastorate of a church there with the 
privilege of dictating the number of ministers 
and churches to share with ours the religious 
work of that community, salary corresponding 
to size of parish, what dictum would be forth- 
coming? No one of us would ask more than 
one other pastor and church, and nearly every 
one would prefer the field alone. 

There is another well-known town of twenty- 
eight hundred people. No one of us called to 
minister in it, endowed with autocratic power, 
227 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

would tolerate more than one other pastor and 
church. Yet we count eight churches there. 

Another town of five thousand people con- 
tains thirteen churches, twelve of which had 
pastors a year ago. No one of us, if called to 
labor there, would ask more than three pas- 
toral colaborers. 

Remember that you and I would rather 
have more than less than a thousand people of 
all ages in our several parishes, if allowed free 
scope." 

Denominationally, ministers and others are 
possibly friendly and tolerate each other, but 
who ever heard of one — on a Christian Golden 
Rule basis — giving up his field or his salary 
or his members to another denomination when 
it was weak, while he was strong, because it 
equally with him belonged to the grand denomi- 
national system which "exists and will exist 
and ought to exist," a legitimate sharer in the 
"divine unity in variety" ? Nothing ever, any- 
228 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

where does a denominationalist as such, accord 
to another, unless he cannot help it. 

Again denominationalism is objectionable in 
its relation to practical results. Herein the 
"very elect" are deceived and thinkers led fatal- 
ly astray, as intimated in a former discussion 
— by "appearance" which is not of "heart." . 

So a speaker at a Mission Convention : "The 
essential unity of the Christian Church is seen 
in the midst of manifold outward variety. 
From the domains of nature and of society may 
be drawn many illustrations of this point. To 
a child all the stars may look alike, but astron- 
omers know well that one star differs from 
another star in glory. Look at the human face 
divine. In that, as in every department, God 
is always original; He never makes a copy. 
If the Church is God's workmanship we must 
look for the same characteristics in it that we 
find elsewhere. The gardener with his shears 
can trim dead trees to make them all look ex- 
actly alike. Let the trees be alive and he will 

22Q 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

seek in vain to preserve their uniformity. The 
day after to-morrow the likeness will be gone." 
Referring to his ten children, the speaker said 
he "rejoiced in the diversity of form and char- 
acter among them; the one supplied what the 
other lacked — so with the Church of Christ." 

All this is perfectly true, but it is picture- 
gallery talk, and not of heart and life. If the 
children of God and Christ's Church are here 
simply on exhibition — let there be a thousand- 
fold "variety" in their "unity." But in fact 
they are, on the field of experience and action, 
supremely straitened for accomplishment. 

As long as the ten children are viewed in the 
light of an attractive display, let their indi- 
vidual peculiarities be encouraged and admired. 
But suppose the specialty of each takes the form 
of a perverse and wilful judgment, and ignor- 
ing the facts and laws of family and hygienic 
authority, each eats and drinks in personal self- 
indulgence, until there stand before you ten 
pale, emaciated, haggard, pitiable invalids. 
230 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

What now of the "beautiful variety in essential 
unity" ? 

Imagine again the ten on a river bank; a 
neighbor's child has fallen in and is even now 
struggling in the waters. If he is saved, the 
ten must save him — and they can without a 
peradventure save him if in unity and coopera- 
tion they conform to the facts and laws of 
rescue. But he drowns, and drowns because o,f 
the ten, each asserts himself, and jostles and 
confuses and counteracts the others. What of 
the charming "variety in unity" now? 

Editors and orators are forever saying: 
"Differing denominations, which exist and will 
exist and ought to exist, are like a mighty 
army with its varying divisions of regiments 
or brigades, or like the dissimilar states in and 
for one nation." Imaginary exhibitions again 
— what for experience and action ? This : A 
panorama of war with the national capital in- 
vested and state troops summoned to the rescue. 
Here they are approaching the scene of con- 
231 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

flict, marshalled denominationally. Thirty di- 
visions are here possibly in a "Federation," 
which, to he sure, keeps them from fighting 
each other ; but pitiably deficient in military 
discipline and development, with no primary 
relation to the commander-in-chief, in either 
subordinate or patriotic passion, no zealous en- 
thusiasm for the cause, no principles of effect- 
ive unity, no economical or scientific coopera- 
tion, no fraternity of feeling or plan, and not 
a little rivalry and jealousy in every direction. 
As the result, the city falls and the enemy 
reigns, or if not this, the enemy perennially 
threatens and the city trembles and the cause 
of patriotism languishes as the nation fails of 
its own for prosperity or appropriate conquest. 
"He pitied the ruffled plumage and forgot 
the dying bird," said the critics of Edmund 
Burke, and denominationalists, fascinated by 
appearances and arguing from exhibitions, 
complacently rejoice in the unruffled "plumage" 
232 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

of denominationalism and forget the "dying 
bird" of Christianity. How long? 

Singing poetic lullabies about beautiful stars 
and garden beds and states and a "mighty 
army," and "the great plan of the universe, 
unity in variety," denominationalists forget the 
conditions of character and action — of life, 
and their own delinquencies in respect of it. 

Then sectarianism is objectionable in that it 
so ignobly fails, and fails while at home and 
abroad, thwarting and obstructing Christianity. 
It fails in numerical organization. Not to mul- 
tiply such instances as that of the "Oklahoma 
preacher who details his struggles in a town of 
six hundred people and six churches" — we have 
150,000 Protestant ministers for 68,000,000 
Protestant population, "babies and all"— and 
one minister for every 450 of population. Now 
let 1,350 of population, an exceedingly small 
charge, be assigned to each minister, and you 
have 100,000 ministers free for appointments 
233 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

to Foreign Missions, and millions of money 
saved, by which to support them. 

To quote again Rev, John W. Conklin : "Just 
with our unneeded crumbs we could supply the 
missions beyond their fondest dreams. The 
money saved in the closing of the parasitic 
churches here would go far toward supporting 
the transferred ministers. Looked at from this 
point of view, the matter assumes colossal im- 
portance. The vision of waste on one side and 
emptiness on the other is stunning. One can- 
not picture or characterize it fairly without 
laying himself open to the charge of fanati- 
cism or lunacy." 

Moreover, sectarianism fails to save. With 
always and everywhere an exceedingly small 
percentage of increase, in recent years some of 
our largest denominations have actually de- 
creased. Says Dr. Rossiter : "Men give heed 
to every other consideration under the sun, be- 
fore they will give heed to obligations that will 
be best for them and their family religiously. 
234 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

The Gospel has lost grip upon the conscience 
and the loyalty of men, and what is the 
reason ? 

Some say that the division of Christianity 
into sects, denominations, little protesting 
cliques, is having its inevitable consequences : 
(i) Confusion of mind on the part of the 
hearers as to which one is true. (2) Rejec- 
tion of them all, because each of them seems 
faulty. Where an audience hears one hundred 
and fifty men proclaiming a Gospel, each one 
having something peculiar to itself which it af- 
firms is the simon-pure and only real Gospel, 
with some words of criticism for all the other 
one hundred and forty-nine gospels, there must 
result confusion of mind, and then apathy. - 
And that is the condition we are in in this 
country. We have one hundred and fifty de- 
nominations of Christians, and each claims its 
own peculiar gospel as the truthful est truth, 
and that the others are wanting in some es- 
235 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sential particular. And there is widespread 
confusion of mind and a general apathy." 

It likewise fails to give. Here in brief is a 
statement of "how Americans spend their 
money": Chewing-gum, $11,000,000; milli- 
nery, $80,000,000; confectionery, $178,000,- 
000 ; jewelry and plate, $700,000,000 ; tobacco, 
$750,600,000; liquor, $1,243,000,000; church 
work at home, $250,000,000; foreign missions, 
$7,500,000! It would be highly edifying, 
under this schedule, to push the inquiry : How 
proportionately as to these various objects, do 
American Christians spend their money? 

To quote J. Campbell White : "If the Chris- 
tian Church in America could be brought to 
give one postage stamp per capita a week to 
foreign missions, it would give $10,000,000 
in a year. If it would give one carfare a week, 
$50,000,000. If it would give one dish of ice- 
cream a week, $100,000,000. If the equivalent 
of one hour's work — not at the prices which 
you get for your labor, but at the rate of the 
236 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

most unskilled labor in the country — $150,- 
000,000." 

Furthermore, denominationalism is flagrant- 
ly obstructive. An editorial of the February 
9, 1899 Independent eloquently urged Christian 
Unity for "our new possessions," as follows : 
"Shall it be the Church of Christ, or shall it 
be a medley of rival, perhaps even a wrangle of 
conflicting sects? That is the question now be- 
fore the Churches ; what shall be their answer ? 
We do not ask what the various missionary 
societies or secretaries want, but, rather, what 
the Churches want. 

What shall the Christian Church do in 
Porto Rico? Of course, it must occupy the 
field. Father Sherman says, and quite truly, 
that Porto Rico is a Catholic island without 
religion. This being so nearly true, the field is 
open for religious work by Americans, both 
Catholic and Protestant. The two cannot work- 
together, but cannot the Protestants work as 
237 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

one body ? If they will, they can ; and then they 
can do great things. 

Why should our distinctive denominational 
designations be perpetuated in Porto Rico ? The 
Island is a natural paradise; why not let it be- 
come an ecclesiastical paradise? Why cannot 
our benevolent societies be all satisfied to es- 
tablish simple Churches of Christ, and call them 
by nothing else than the simple name of their 
Master? Such churches we do not doubt that 
the Porto Ricans would welcome. 

Is this too much to ask? Is it anything 
more than was done by Peter and Paul, when 
they organized their first churches? Let the 
churches use a presbytery or not as they please 
let them baptise by immersion or by sprinkling 
let them have elders or bishops, as they please 
let them follow their own freedom or strictures, 
as they please ; but let them all be nothing other 
or more than a Church of Christ and let them 
all fellowship each other in the old Christian 
way of generous freedom guaranteed by the 
238 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

first Council of Jerusalem. In Japan six de- 
nominations united to form one; why cannot 
we all agree that in Porto Rico we will be one 
in the name of Jesus Christ?" 

In fact, however, the "Name which is above 
every name" was slighted and God's decree for 
the "preeminence in all things" forgotten and 
the Churches started downward and not up- 
ward, astray and not in the path — the ecclesias- 
tical path of which God has said, "This is the 
way, walk ye in it" — and so we read in the 
issue of April 6th the following: 

"We had hoped that the scramble of the de- 
nominations in Porto Rico might be avoided, 
but this is impossible. We wished — but it was 
really beyond hope — that there might be one 
Church of Christ in Porto Rico, embracing all 
Christians who do not belong to the Roman 
Catholic Church, a Church not Presbyterian or 
Congregational or Baptist or Methodist, but 
simply Christian. But this may not be. Gen- 
eral Henry, the Military Governor of Porto 
239 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Rico, wanted it, and the Christian officers and 
civilians in San Juan wanted it, and they or- 
ganized union services in the theater, but they 
did not organize a church and bid the sectarians 
keep off. Now the sectarians have come and 
nothing can now save the field from a sectarian 
Christianity. 

'Our churches demand to be represented,' 
they all say. 'We can make an appeal for our 
own sort,' they would say, 'not for any union 
work' ; or 'Our charter does not allow us to 
aid any but our own denominational churches' ; 
'and, besides,' they would say, 'this denomina- 
tional rivalry is not a bad thing; it assures 
more being done; and it looks worse at a dis- 
tance than it really is. The missionaries will 
not quarrel, for they are Christians, and they 
will have their conferences together, and to 
the native Porto Ricans the difference will not 
be discernible.' But the pity of it, the pity of 
it, that our missionary societies cannot for a 
while sink their denominational ambition !" 
240 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Yes, the pity of it and the prospect of it, too ! 
For never in the history of Church activity at 
home or abroad have sectarians proclaimed, 
"This denominational rivalry is not a bad 
thing," and proceeded accordingly, that Chris- 
tianity and the Christ of it, have not been in 
fact subordinated to the notions and institutions 
of men, and the little things of sectarianism, 
urged triumphantly up among or over the 
mighty things of grace and truth and God, with 
the assured anticipation of "spiritual decline 
and death" ! 

The melancholy story is told in the experi- 
ences of another field, reported a year after 
in the same journal : "About forty years ago 
three societies — representing two nationalities 
— began work in a large Oriental city. For 
over half this period the converts knew no de- 
nominational name, and were known as 'be- 
lievers'; 'ism' they never heard of. Union 
meetings were frequently held, always once a 
month in addition to the week of prayer. Thus 
241 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

it was for over twenty years. Then a fourth 
society entered the field. It had a name — a 
name of little or no significance, as it appeared 
transposed by sound into the native tongue. It 
had little effect in the way of differentiation, 
for the missionaries were good men and for- 
got their ism. A number of years later, follow- 
ing a series of union evangelistic meetings, a 
union C. E. society was formed. Its meetings 
were a blessing to all, and doubtless they would 
have continued to the present time, with in- 
creasing benefit, but for an incident. A digni- 
tary of the society last in the field made a visit 
of inspection. His dictum divided the C. E. 
society and compelled his branch to assume a 
new 7 name. Such dictum was not in accord 
with the views of his brethren then in charge 
of the work. The result was spiritual decline 
and death." 

But will now this uncertain, this anomalous 
situation continue? Not long. Some one has 
truly said, "Tenacity of denominationalism is 
242 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

generally in proportion as the distinctive fea- 
ture is not found in the Bible." Yes, and is 
not tributary to Christ and is significant of dis- 
solution withal. 

Striking the keynote of denominationalism, 
and tolling its death knell at the same moment, 
one of our denominational editors, referring to 
the Scotch Highlanders, in their madness of 
secession, remarks : "It is pleasing to see any 
manifestation of strong adherence to conscien- 
tious convictions ; steadfast adherence to what 
one believes is the most respectable trait in 
human nature." This sounds harmless — 
musical indeed in its familiar plausibility, but 
in fact it entirely forbids applied Christianity 
and is in effect fatal to Church life and at the 
same time defiant of God. "Strong adherence 
to conscientious conviction ; steadfast adher- 
ence to what one believes" will embitter any 
family, terminate any friendship, dissolve any 
business partnership, break up any secular or- 
ganization in the land. It will moreover dis- 
243 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

rupt any single church, endlessly divide any 
denomination and hopelessly estrange any 
actual or possible association of believers. It 
does, however, represent denominationalism, in- 
dicate its madness, and forecast its overthrow. 
It has within itself the germs of dissolution, 
but moreover it is proscribed, as well as mori- 
bund. 

When at any time, in anything in which He 
is divinely interested, God gets all things ready 
in the department of supply, and admits to 
close relations with it the eager applications of 
demand, results — and if need be, radical re- 
sults — always follow. When in the feeding of 
the five thousand, it was evening, and the tide 
of Christ's divine "compassion on the multi- 
tude" had risen to its flood, and the faint and 
hungry throng, already reclining in ranks by 
hundreds and by fifties on the green grass, were 
eagerly awaiting him, even though the twelve 
each with his "variety" which belongs to 
"unity" had announced a dilatory and self- 
244 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

gratifying and obstructive program of admin- 
istration, it would have made not the slightest 
difference, nor kept the hungry people waiting 
for one moment — much less all through the 
night. 

It takes no specially endowed prophet to see 
that at this twentieth century juncture, the Mas- 
ter in His compassion is at hand and in au- 
thority too, that men, great multitudes of men 
"besides women and children" — are hungry, 
and desperately hungry, and pathetically ap- 
pealing, that full supplies and perfected facili- 
ties are available — and to predict that this is 
the day of God's redemption and not man's self- 
indulgence. The demand for Christianity is 
measureless and supremely urgent, the suffi- 
ciency of Christianity is conceded, the organ- 
ization of Christianity is indispensable, and the 
realities and laws of the Kingdom tell the storj 
of a new era. 



245 



CHAPTER VI 

In this closing chapter of Organized Chris- 
tianity, in its unique specialties, we may ask : 
Is it feasible, desirable, demanded, and under 
what principles and particulars of administra- 
tion is it to be prosecuted ? 

This writer lives in a rapidly growing 
town, with which he is thoroughly acquainted. 
It has five thousand inhabitants with six 
Churches. Imagine some mighty magic proc- 
ess by which all its public institutions are 
suddenly blotted out — with people and homes 
and business all untouched. 

Very soon under national and state laws, 
with self-control of individuals, observing busi- 
ness principles and invoking the light of ex- 
perience and common sense, the people meet, 
organize and reconstruct. With strictest 
246 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

economy and up-to-date enterprise they study 
ends and means. 

The result is one Post Office, one Police 
Court, one Railroad station, one Fire depart- 
ment, one Public School, established and in due 
time successfully run by men having radical 
and endless diversities of character and tastes 
— but actuated by one dominant purpose. 

Now for the churches and the sixteen hun- 
dred Christians. They are about to recon- 
struct on the old denominational basis, when a 
supernatural magic arrests them ; they suddenly 
remember that they are subject to the law of 
Christ, "the Head of all things to the Church," 
and now they proceed obediently and not in 
personal self-gratification, mindful of business 
principles, and the facts and laws of human 
need and human nature ; and with one accord, 
organize one Christian Church, holding them- 
selves strictly to the four Means for the four 
Ends of New Testament Christianity. They 
have one thoroughly furnished church build- 
247 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ing, centrally located. In due time they have 
one well-supported pastor of the Moody- Storrs 
type, spiritual, scholarly, executive, right with 
God, sympathetic with men, mighty in the 
Scriptures, and apt for all the ends of social 
life and uplift in the community, and withal 
on Mondays wont to go down the hay, and to 
the ocean, with as much fun as he can well get 
out of it for himself and others. 

The Christians themselves are, as Christians 
all ought to he, filled with passion for Christ 
and souls of men, and with the graces of the 
Spirit, intelligent and obedient students of the 
Bible. Of course they radically differ mentally 
and temperamentally, just as business men do, 
but, just as business men do, cordially unite 
and cooperate for common and transcendent 
interests. They have personality and self-as- 
sertion — but humility and brotherly love as 
well. They have one Sabbath School with 
various outreachings. They have one Chris- 
tian Endeavor Society. They have ordinances 
248 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

with the deepest spirituality, but in forms as 
people prefer them. They escape countless 
sources of division, distraction and contro- 
versy. [Moreover, five ministers and at least 
five thousand dollars per annum are released 
for other fields where they are infinitely needed. 
Now all the sectarian apologists upon earth 
can be confidently challenged to visit this scene 
and, taking knowledge most exhaustively of 
former conditions, to detect a single point at 
which denominational ism or Federation could 
have given the least advantage, .or from the 
standpoint of New Testament Christianity, to 
point out a single valid objection to the new 
arrangement, or indeed any objection in any 
respect save only in the matter of biases re- 
buked or disappointment and chagrin in step- 
ping down and out from offices. 

Here from Home fields come varying testi- 
monials of the undoubted feasibility of Or- 
ganized Christianity. A most intelligent au- 
thority from Maine is here : "This new type is 
249 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

seen by many men in all denominations. It is 
a broad and comprehensive type, which lays 
emphasis upon the essentials of faith and per- 
mits sectarian peculiarities to drop into the 
background. Doctrine is more and more giv- 
ing place to life; dogma yields daily to Christ- 
like charity and love. About the Person of 
Christ the Protestant Evangelical Church is 
rallying and finding the basis of union there. 
Literature confesses this. But without resort 
to literature, he who can attend religious gath- 
erings -of denominations, and of Christian 
workers from many denominations, finds the 
emphasis on Christ, and the theological per- 
spective becoming more and more truly 
Christo-centric, and the type of Christian en- 
deavor becoming Christian. This tendency, 
however, the country church has not as yet ex- 
tensively realized. The average country church, 
in theology and consequent practical Christian 
living, is where it was a half century ago. De- 
nominational leaders are in good part respon- 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sible for this. They have cultivated denomina- 
tional esprit de corps by reverting to past 
glories, by calling up conditions no longer ex- 
isting, by stimulating the historical imagina- 
tion, so desirable in the student of history, but 
so pernicious in the Christian who must do 
his part to-day in making local Christian his- 
tory. . . . 

But these subjects, if treated in the old way, 
do not present Christ as He is. Doctrines 
are needed, but the doctrines of the broadest 
outlook, the truest insight, the richest experi- 
ence, and the fullest conception of Christianity, 
that God in His providence has been teaching 
the world in the school of these centuries past. 
The Christo-centric, and the Christo-livable 
type of Christianity must be set up in the 
country town." 

Another from Kansas : "I came here three 
years ago and found four churches practically 
inoperative, though their guns were still point- 
ed at each other. They had services semi-occa- 
251 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sionally, but no resident minister. So I — 
though twenty-five years a Baptist minister — 
persuaded them to confederate without regard 
to creed or ritual, simply for the purpose of 
maintaining a Gospel service and to save the 
people from heathenism. So we formed a 
Christian association, called The People's 
Church.' The article of membership was life 
and loyalty to Jesus Christ. . . . For three 
years I have ministered on this basis without 
a ripple of dissention, and the town, though a 
difficult and godless mining town, has liberally 
supported the move." 

Still another from the vicinity of New York : 
"Our membership represents a dozen different 
denominations. We receive members by let- 
ter from other churches, and have dismissed 
them by letter to other denominations. The 
validity of a letter from our church has never 
once been questioned. Most Christians who have 
come among us have gladly joined us. Uni- 
tarians will not join nor Roman Catholics, al- 
252 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

though they attend our services and gladly co- 
operate in all our benevolent work. Methodists 
and Presbyterians both believe in the divine 
election to serve, and want it preached. Bap- 
tists freely accord the privilege of infant bap- 
tism, when parents desire it; they admit that 
the rite is very impressive. Some Episcopalians 
like our service better than their own. . . . 
Into our pulpit, or social meetings, denomina- 
tional shibboleths are never admitted. It might 
be thought that such absence of doctrinal teach- 
ing would produce a flabby sort of Christian 
character, but we have found that the life and 
the truth in Jesus Christ call us to the most 
exacting and strenuous spiritual discipline." 

Years ago, a Methodist declared with en- 
thusiasm : "If we had a hundred Moodys and 
Sankeys in this country, all the orthodox 
Protestant sects would unite within ten years. 
We would have an entirely new system of or- 
ganization and work. Instead of our numerous 
little churches, half sustained and half-filled on 
253 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Sundays, we should have vast buildings, rival- 
ing the old cathedrals of Europe in size, and 
crowded with worshipers. Each of these great 
temples would be the center of the religious 
life of a large district, and for parish work we 
would have numerous mission chapels, contain- 
ing a library, reading-room, prayer-meeting 
room, and the offices of the working charitable 
societies." 

Manifestly feasible at home, Organized 
Christianity is still more evidently practicable 
abroad, where there is deeper hunger for it. 
To illustrate from the truly Christian opera- 
tions of the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion, says Rev. F. W. Anderson : "During 1901 
the International Committee had twenty-two 
representatives, with headquarters in fifteen 
different centers in India, Ceylon, China, Japan, 
Korea and South America. During 1902 some 
ten new men were added to the force of' secre- 
taries, and several new centers have been 
opened up. Special attention is given to de- 
254 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

veloping the work among the students and 
educated natives, and the influence of the work 
is great. Evangelistic meetings are held, and 
Bible classes for inquirers and also for Chris- 
tians are conducted, while the secretaries have 
all the personal interviews they can attend to. 
All this work is carried on with the hearty sup- 
port and cooperation of the missionary force. 
No new field has been opened up without the 
urgent request of the foreign missionaries and 
the influential natives interested, and the limit 
to which this work may be extended and devel- 
oped is bounded, not by the need nor the op- 
portunity, but by the number of properly 
trained leaders and the home cooperation neces- 
sary to support their effort." 

With very slight superficial adjustments, and 
a new survey of the field, and new reading or 
the Great Commission and due emancipation 
from the sectarianism of the home "Boards," 
the "missionary force" could not only heartily 
support and cooperate in this work, but for- 
255 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

saking schism and divisions, in glorious unity 
embark anew under its cross-lit banners. 

Nobody expects that Primitive Christianity 
can be restored, and Christ, not only in our 
hymns but our hearts and organizations 
"crowned Lord of all," in a day, or without a 
costly, though reasonable breaking up of the 
old order, but Organized Christianity is to-day 
undoubtedly feasible. 

Ten years ago a Princeton Professor (with 
plentiful recent echoes from the same quarter) 
remarked: "We cannot expect Evangelical 
Christians to be willing to unite on the basis 
of the minimum of truth held by them in com- 
mon." Why not? What they intelligently 
hold in common is a minimum that includes 
the maximum of aims and agencies of New 
Testament piety, and precludes only the self- 
indulgence in prepossessions, which learned but 
biased men insist upon enshrining at the cen- 
ters, but which, although expressed in ambi- 
tious and academic terms, are in fact insignif- 
256 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

icant in practical claims, and are to be rele- 
gated at once and forever to the domain of 
private opinion. 

What a book reviewer says of Sabatier's 
doubtful half truths is undoubtedly true of Or- 
ganized Christianity : "It furnishes the ground 
on which the unity of Christendom becomes 
possible, not by attenuating the differences 
which now divide the various branches of the 
Christian Church, but by raising the whole 
question to a plane, upon which these questions 
lose their significance." 

Truly says the Westminster, of Philadelphia: 
"Not by modifications in ecclesiastical milli- 
nery, nor by anxious modifications of doctrine, 
nor by asking how much each may surrender, 
but by possession of the purpose of Christ 
shall the Church become one. Then in accord- 
ance with its deep unity of purpose, it shall 
clothe itself in ritual, creed and polity express- 
ive of its faith." 

"The only way in which American people 
257 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

have not shown a genius for organization," 
says President Woodrow Wilson, "is that they 
have not shown a genius for simplification." 
This may be true in the realm of scholarship, 
but it can scarcely be said of the American in 
the activities of business life, and it need not 
be at all true in the activities of piety. In New 
Testament days differing Christians organized 
in and for the "simplicity that is in Christ" and 
the twentieth century is the time, and America 
the place for them to do it again — to give in- 
deed Christianity at last a fair trial. "I don't 
know, sir, it has never been tried," replied 
Wendell Phillips, when asked, "Is Christianity 
a failure?" 

New Testament Christianity is feasible — 
and "now is the accepted time" to try it. 

Again, Organized Christianity is not only 
generally desirable but cogently demanded — 
alike by the imperativeness of God and the ever 
increasing exigencies of men. Dr. Josiah 
Strong, as long ago as 1893, warned us that 
258 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

times and people were radically changing, and 
that we had got to change with them and for 
them. He says : "So general a tendency to- 
ward the centralization of population, of politi- 
cal power, of capital and of production, mani- 
fested in ways so various, can indicate noth- 
ing less than a great movement toward a closer 
organization of society, a new development of 
civilization"; and quotes as follows: "If any- 
thing has been made certain by the economic 
revolution of the last twenty-five years, it is 
that society cannot much longer get on upon 
the old libertarian, competitive, go-as-you- 
please system, to which so many sensible per- 
sons seem addicted. The population of the 
great nations is becoming too condensed for 
that." Again : "It is felt by every student and 
every statesman, that some movement, vast and 
momentous, though indefinite, is passing like 
a great wave over the civilized world. It is 
idle to refuse to admit the fact that modern 
civilization is in a transition state. . . . There 
259 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

are a thousand evidences that the present state 
of things is drawing to a close, and that some 
new development of social organization is at 
hand." Once more: "Everywhere, the old 
order is changing and giving place unto the 
new. The human race is now at one of the 
crucial periods in its history, when the foun- 
tains of the great deep are broken up, and the 
flood of change submerges all the old-estab- 
lished institutions and conventions, in the midst 
of which preceding generations have lived and 
died." 

Constitutional indolence, conservatism and 
self-complacency of rulers in nations and 
churches, are such, that revolutionary tenden- 
cies without, have usually appealed in vain for 
new and appropriate measures of and for re- 
form, at headquarters, until appalling disasters 
and losses have been precipitated upon all par- 
ties — disasters and losses which a wise fidelity 
to facts and principles would surely have pre- 
vented. The Church at home and abroad .is 
260 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

confronted by universal, deep-seated and por- 
tentous revolution in the thought, sentiments, 
purposes and organizations of men, and the one 
demand of all the world, is for the Christianity 
of the Redeeming Christ, and this, according 
to the love and law of the Redeeming Christ ! 

And is the Church ready, equipped, watch- 
ing? Hear Archdeacon Farrar : "Our pres- 
ent methods will not reach them ; to our elabo- 
rate theologies, and our routine ceremonies, 
our professional fineries, they have nothing to 
say ; for rubrics and millinery and stereotyped 
services, they care no more than they do for the 
idle wind ; they want a broader, simpler, larger, 
truer, manlier, less conventional, less corrupt, 
less fourth-century gospel ; they want the es- 
sential gospel : they want Christ. 

New times want new methods and new 
men ; and if we do not adopt new methods, and 
find new men who really are men, we shall die 
of our impotent respectability. 

Churches need many resurrections, many 
261 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Pentecosts. An unprogressive is a dying 
church ; a retrogressive church is a dead church. 
The efforts of such churches are but the spas- 
modic semblance of activity; the ceremonies of 
such churches are but as spangles on their 
funeral pall. . . . The deliverance will come 
in God's good time; but it will not come from 
the popular phrases or the dominant machin- 
ery. It will only come when among all the 
soft, bland tones which fill our ears, God gives 
us once more some prophet's mighty voice." 

Here is an editorial comment which is just 
as cogently applicable to the United States as 
it is to Great Britain: "Rev. Dr. Alex. Mac- 
laren, of Manchester, England, greatest of liv- 
ing preachers, is reported as saying that he 
confesses that his heart sometimes fails him 
when he thinks of the present aspects and pros- 
pects of Christianity in Great Britain. The 
great wealth, the loosened bonds of Christian 
faith, the neglect of the Sabbath, the growing 
senseless luxury, the godlessness of all classes 
262 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

of society in this day, from the highest to the 
lowest, are enough to break the heart of work- 
ers. He could not but read in the social life 
of England, in the public action of the coun- 
try, in the corruption of the municipalities, in 
the growing intemperance of the people, in the * 
manifestly increasing impatience of the press, 
in the leaders of opinion, who were ready to 
shake off the last fragments of Christianity, 
and who in many cases were talking rubbish 
and nonsense about the superior claims of 
Buddhism, Hinduism, and he knew not what 
'ism' — he could not but see in all these things, 
a call to Christian people to be ashamed of their 
quarrelings and envyings, and to go forward 
shoulder to shoulder, and to close their ranks 
against the foe. 

Everything that Dr. Maclaren says is en- 
titled to a hearing. How solemn the testimony 
of this man of such advanced years, who, in 
his fifty years' ministry has never said or writ- 
ten anything that needs to be recalled ! And 
263 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

what a trumpet peal to the Church, calling on 
all disciples to forget insignificant differences, 
in view of their magnificent basis of agreement 
on vital truths, and the singular unity and 
solidarity of a malignant foe!" 

And is the Church exhibiting becoming vigi- 
lance and fidelity at the foreign outposts ? Look 
at this single picture of one of multitudes — 
drawn by Robert E. Lewis, of the Young Men's 
Christian Association : "Close observation of 
the work of the American Board in China con- 
vinces me that somebody has acted with no less 
than awful neglect of the Lord's work. The 
support of the work has fallen off, the number 
of workers at great centers has decreased, the 
largeness of the ripe harvest has overwhelmed 
the small band of workers. At Foochow, the 
force has been so small and the work so great 
that in the midst of taxing language-study one 
missionary is forced to take charge of and 
superintend the following work : ( i ) He is 
president of a theological seminary, with 
264 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

twenty-four students, and must direct the teach- 
ing as well as do much of it — all in Chinese — - 
for the most pressing need of the mission is for 
trained Chinese workers. (2) There are nine 
native churches in the city which he alone 
must supervise, and whose difficulties and prob- 
lems he must help the native pastors to solve. 
(3) There are four chapels, not yet organized 
as churches, which he must provide for. There 
is no one else to do it. (4) There are twelve 
day schools in the city under his care. There is 
a Chinese teacher for each, but can the schools 
be left without supervision? Not unless they 
are abandoned. 

Nor is this all. In the neighboring coun- 
try there are some thirty villages, in each of 
which from three hundred to five hundred per- 
sons have given up their idols, and have asked 
the mission to send to each a native pastor. 
But there is no money to send a single man. 
Within nine miles of this theological seminary, 
there are twenty points where the people have 
265 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

already built chapels, and are waiting for pas- 
tors, but not a single man can be sent. God 
only knows what will become of these villages, 
but it is clear that the last state of them may 
be worse than the first. 

When one faces such overwhelming oppor- 
tunities, such pressure of work, and such an in- 
difference on the part of American Christians, 
that the work is brought to this pass, he is led 
to wonder what the end will be. Three per- 
sons will be sent into that mission this year, 
but where twenty are actually needed, the pres- 
sure will not be relieved. Whose is this crimi- 
nal neglect?" 

The present demand is supremely urgent be- 
cause with the ever-rising tide of intellectual, 
social, political, moral agitation, the former de- 
mands have not been met, and the present 
cumulative twentieth century application, we 
may be sure, is for an unincumbered Chris- 
tianity. Denominationalism has failed and will 
fail, and from its relation to laws and facts 
266 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

alike, must fail. Federation, too, in the mo- 
mentous crisis of sin and redemption, must and 
will fail. Its confession of faith is : "Lord, I 

will follow Thee, but suffer me first " Its 

profession of consecration is : "I ought to sur- 
render all, but I will keep back part of the 
price." 

Rev. H. A. Bridgeman describes it, and 
united Churches of New Zealand repudiate it. 
Says Mr. Bridgeman : "Above all, Porto Rico 
should furnish a shining illustration of har- 
mony and cooperation between different Chris- 
tian bodies. Three years ago, when work was 
beginning there, we heard a good deal about 
conferences between the different Boards in 
New York, and of an allotment of different 
sections of the island to different denomina- 
tions. How are the compacts then made being 
fulfilled ? What degree of fellowship and co- 
operation is there to-day between the thirteen 
members of our American Missionary Associa- 
tion mission, the twenty-one Presbyterian, the 
267 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

ten Baptists, the five Episcopalians, and be- 
tween all of these Christian workers and the 
United States Commissioner of Education, and 
his one hundred and twenty-five teachers?" 

An Independent editorial remarks signifi- 
cantly : "The biologists suggest to us that sud- 
den changes in environment are likely to orig- 
inate new species. It was some great con- 
vulsion that separated the geological periods, 
with their diverse fauna and flora. When one 
great cycle of animals and plants was destroyed 
by the upheaval of some mountain chain, the 
few survivors produced a different progeny 
fitted for the new conditions." It then adds 
of the New Zealanders : "Can we imagine the 
Presbyterian General Assembly and the Metho- 
dist General Conference and the Congrega- 
tional National Council here agreeing to unite 
into a single body ? Yet that is what these de- 
nominations, and others, expect to do in New 
Zealand. A deputation from the Presbyterian 
General Assembly visited the Methodist General 
268 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Conference, and proposed union. To be sure, 
said their speaker, we have different creeds, one 
Calvinistic, the other Arminian, but both are 
true and we will make a new creed. This 
proposition was received enthusiastically, and 
when a resolution was introduced recognizing 
the fading of sectarian differences, and appoint- 
ing committees to confer on a plan of federa- 
tion, the word was changed to union, and the 
resolution unanimously adopted.'' 

Anywhere Christian union is feasible if it be 
Christian j and everywhere the voices of Heaven 
and earth are heard, calling for Christianity 
that is unqualified and unencumbered — the New 
Testament Christianity of Christ and the 
apostles and the early Church ! 

Christianity is to-day feasible, demanded, 
sufficient and alone sufficient ! 

But according to what established principles 

and with what practical prescriptions are we 

to proceed ? It has been suggestively said that 

"The mountains will show you the valleys, 

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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

but the valleys will not show you the moun- 
tains." And it is doubtless true that the val- 
leys of denominationalism will not interpret 
the mountains of Christianity, while on the 
other hand it is certain that the mountains of 
Christianity will most illuminatingly interpret 
the denominations. And in these days of more 
or less blind bondage to denominationalism, 
the hope of the Church lies in rising in due 
emancipation as speedily as possible, to the 
heights of Christ and the apostles, and so for- 
mulating creeds and plans for appropriate en- 
terprise. Being of "one accord" in this exalted 
situation, Pentecostal inspirations will make 
"all things" ours, whether of ends or means. 

Organizing Christianity, shall we be like the 
Italian Christians, embarrassed for a name? 
In fact almost any name will answer so long 
as it surely honors the Transcendent Name — 
The Church of God, The Church of the New 
Testament, The New Testament Christian As- 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

sociation, The Christian Association, might 
answer. 

Then for Creed. Creed making, the old 
"hie labor, hoc opus est'' of our sectarian fore- 
fathers, is quite an easy matter in these days. 
The last Congregational creed is a good one, 
Scriptural and Evangelical. Such is also the 
admirable catechism of 1898, unanimously 
adopted by representatives of Wesleyan Metho- 
dists, Baptists, Primitive Methodists, Presby- 
terians, Methodist New Connection, Bible 
Christians, and United Methodist Free Church, 
in England and reported in full in the Inde- 
pendent of February 9, 1899. Then the Young 
Men's Christian Association and Union 
Churches furnish ready to our hands Christo- 
centric creeds. 

Here is the Westminster's contribution: 

First : That Jesus is the divine and living 
Lord. 

Second : That He came down from Heaven 
and died in atonement for our sins. 
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ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Third : That the Bible is the inspired Word 
of God, "the only infallible rule of faith and 
practice." 

Fourth : That every Christian is saved to 
serve, and is responsible for his opportunities 
to influence others. 

Fifth: That there is no might nor power 
but by the Spirit of the living God. 

Polity, too, which so worried and divided our 
controversial ancestors, is for us quite a sim- 
ple matter. As Sohm has clearly shown, in this 
respect, the New Testament leaves us — under 
the superintendence of the Holy Spirit — quite 
at liberty for the pursuit of spiritual ends by 
business methods. In this the history and ex- 
perience of the Young Men's Christian Asso- 
ciation instruct us — as do also the "Children 
of this world," "in their generation wiser than 
the children of light." Our ecclesiastical fore- 
fathers could have saved themselves a world 
of vexatious debates if in a teachable spirit 
they had watched a thousand stockholders elect 
272 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

a president and six directors, and then leave to 
them the details of practical control. 

One special item of regulation will speedily 
crowd itself in. for adoption: "No minister 
dependent upon his salary shall ever be engaged 
for less than a thousand dollars a year." This, 
to be sure, ought to be quite comfortably 
adopted when it is recalled that Dr. Josiah 
Strong says that "the hundred richest men in 
the United States, who have the greatest in- 
fluence in the financial world, are almost with- 
out exception, orthodox church members." 

Then Organized Christianity must be duly 
protected from ignorance. Its motto should be : 
"Anything but callowness of mind and crude- 
ness of intellectuality — except leanness of soul." 
Dr. Schauffler once remarked of the Sunday 
School : "It is strong in the heart and weak 
in the head." If it were so it were a grievous 
fault, and a fault still more grievous, if detected 
in the pulpit, especially since if there one be 
273 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

"weak in the head" he is apt to be soft "in the 
heart." 

The demand of an enlightened and critical 
age is for a correspondingly enlightened and 
intellectually powerful ministry. Sometimes 
under exceptional conditions, God graciously 
employs for evidently special reasons, an un- 
educated man for glorious work, but that is 
no more proof that as a rule, the ministers are 
not to be intellectually furnished and master- 
ful, than his occasional employment of a bed- 
ridden invalid, more than others, to edify and 
uplift a neighborhood, proves that religious 
workers are not to walk about in health. 

The law of God, and the ever-growing intelli- 
gence of this generation, alike call for thinkers 
in the pulpit and the parsonage, and while God 
can work by an unfortunately weak man, He 
will not work by a presumptuous and unneces- 
sarily weak man. Dr. Norman Macleod said 
that no doubt a sharp questioner could corner 
him on the habit, but none the less he studied 
274 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and thought as if everything depended on him, 
while he prayed and trusted as if everything 
depended on God. And this is the rule for 
every minister; to call on God as importunate- 
ly as possible, and to call on himself as impera- 
tively as possible, with abundant mental 
supplies within to call upon. It is as if the 
head druggist kept strictly in his own hands 
the secret elixir, which at last gave vital ef- 
ficacy to the mixture, and yet required his 
subordinate clerks to prepare the mixture with 
the greatest pains and the most scientific cor- 
rectness. God sometimes accepts the things 
that are "small." He always refuses the things 
that are cheap. 

President Woodrow Wilson says truly: 
"Pedagogically you cannot impart appreciation 
for the song of a bird, the glory of a landscape 
or the subtle shade of an idiom. 

If ever an age stood in sore need of those 
who see the invisible, this does; if ever an age 
needed statesmanship of the mind, this age 
275 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

needs it. Let there be an army of workers, 
with their gaze concentrated on their own little 
tasks, with no one to dream dreams for them, 
none to see visions, no generals of the mind to 
organize our great combinations of effort, and 
it will not be long before we stumble upon dis- 
aster. I don't mean to tell you that information 
is not a part of education, but I do say that 
brute information — mere gross bodies of fact 
— does not educate. Information, so far from 
accelerating the powers of the mind, may even 
clog them; unless it disciplines it impedes." 

The principle here indicated has a special ap- 
plication to theological students and ministers. 
They must needs have knowledge and a plenty 
of it; but that is not all. They must be edu- 
cated to intuitions of moral and spiritual reali- 
ties. It is not enough that they know the tech- 
nical answers to theological questions, and have 
library-minds with an orderly arrangement of 
orthodox truths, all correctly labelled, and each 
duly numbered on its own shelf or in its own 
276 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

row, but with personal penetration and grasp 
and appropriation and subjective thrill, they 
must "see the invisible" — the invisible beings 
and realities of earth, as well as by spiritual 
perceptions, the invisible beings and realities of 
heaven. They want information much, but 
education more, and correspondingly not only 
capacity to report, but conceptions to express 
and more, a cultivated ripened intellectuality 
which is uniquely fruitful — an intellectuality 
of facts, still more of visions, and above all, 
of inventions. This leads us higher up — not 
only to the realm of truth but of grace. 

"Pedagogically you cannot impart apprecia- 
tion for the song of a bird, the glory of a land- 
scape or the subtle shade of an idiom" — you 
can, however, do these things by educational 
inspiration. But the visions, the insight and 
the corresponding inventions, which belong to 
the Bible student, cannot be imparted either 
pedagogically or by educational inspiration by 
any man. The beauty of holiness, the senti- 
277 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

merits and activities of heaven, the love, the 
voice of God, the heavenly intercessions, the 
earthward manifestations of Christ, the upris- 
ing and reception of prayer or praise, the down- 
ward movements of parental and redemption 
love, can be made constrainingly real to us, only 
by the Spirit of Holiness, who, it is most im- 
portant to remember and emphasize, will not 
duly visit us on* any careless or postponed in- 
vitations. 

The Churches and the young Christian think- 
ers of this day, need beyond all calculation, a 
Theological Seminary of the deepest, broadest, 
brightest, most abounding, up-to-date scholar- 
ship, yet with large spaces and choice hours 
preempted for God ; on the premises large room 
set apart as "the secret place of the Most High" 
— and sacredly reserved time and assured tran- 
quillity for the messages and inspirations that 
come straight down. The Chaplain in fact 
much in evidence. 

There is no call for Christian students, in 
278 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

the Seminary or out of it, to be fussily and 
obtrusively "pious" or to indulge fanaticism 
or parade solemnity, but the department of 
spiritual development is of supreme importance 
and, strange as it may seem, in a Theological 
Seminary, specially liable to neglect. In addi- 
tion to the odd fact of Christian experience, 
that it is far easier to think closely or do vigor- 
ously than to pray devoutly, and our natural 
pride of intellect, there is an added local pride 
— a complacent self-righteousness of theological 
orthodoxy to be vigilantly and resolutely 
guarded against. Variously expressed, the de- 
lusive thought is, "The truth, our truth, covers 
the field of experience, affords light, insures 
power," while all the time, all parties are liable 
to the melancholy combination which Macauley 
deprecated as so disastrous : "A union of high 
intelligence with low desires." 

Not many months since, this writer heard 
the President of a well-known Theological 
Seminary deliver the closing address to a large 
279 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

graduating class, with abounding wit and clas- 
sical propriety, but with no more recognition 
of, or allusion to, spiritual realities, than if they 
had been graduating physicians, lawyers or lec- 
turers. 

Organized Christianity needs a Theological 
Seminary of its own even if there is a super- 
fluity of sectarian ones already, and the reasons 
are patent. As already mentioned in these 
pages, Christian young men in schools and 
colleges have tasted New Testament Chris- 
tianity and its happy unities. At least twenty- 
five hundred of them are virtually committed 
to the declarations of "The Student Recruits 
for the Christian Ministry" of California. 
These say: "We stand for: (i) A united 
Church. We believe that churches divided 
against each other cannot stand. We declare 
ourselves against the competitive missionary 
work anywhere. We agree to work for church 
harmony and unity of spirit. (2) Missionary 
aggressiveness. Believing in the last command 
280 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

of Jesus Christ in the broadest world-wide 
sense, it is the purpose of this organization to 
stand for and promote an intelligent study and 
a wide-awake, active interest in missions. (3) 
An up-to-date ministry. We seek preparation 
to meet and satisfy both the fundamental, and 
the new and special needs of the church in our 
own generation." 

The movement is described as follows : "At 
the recent College Y. M. C. A. Conference, held 
at Pacific Grove, California, over one-fourth of 
the men present, representing every college in 
the State, bound themselves together in a union, 
declared their 'purpose to become ministers of 
Jesus Christ,' and to 'aggressively promote the 
consideration of the ministry as a vocation for 
Christian young men.' This movement has 
taken the name of 'The Student Recruits for 
the Christian Ministry,' and those who formed 
the union, have returned to their sixteen differ- 
ent institutions to further its purposes and gain 
recruits." 

281 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

The fact is the Christian young men of the 
nation know from experience the happy feasi- 
bility of Organized Christianity and when de- 
nominational leaders from thirty (perhaps forty 
or fifty) denominations say to them : "You 
must go separately into our thirty denomina- 
tional Seminaries, and go forth in thirty divi- 
sions, to set up thirty rival missions abroad or, 
on an average salary of seven hundred dollars, 
struggle along in rivalries at home — in com- 
petition with thirty of your brethren," the 
young men decline, and will more and more de- 
cline and turning aside from the regular min- 
istry altogether, go out for Christ and the mis- 
sions of Christ, if they go at all, as Association 
men rather than ministers. The candidates for 
our denominational Seminaries are "alarmingly 
decreasing 1 ' they tell us, and until Seminary 
instruction on a New Testament and not sec- 
tarian basis, can be offered them, they are likely 
to decline, and likely, moreover, to be endorsed 
of God and heaven in doing it. 
282 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

The Christianity of the twentieth century 
needs a Seminary, thoroughly endowed with 
twentieth century liberality, for students ad- 
mitted only after most intelligent acquaintance 
with them, a Seminary, with a four years' 
course, which shall be consecrated to the busi- 
ness of preparing men physically, mentally, 
spiritually, to be preachers and leaders! — a 
four years' rugged, exhilarating, triumphant 
climb up to the enchanted region of exact align- 
ment between the Pastoral and Redeeming 
Christ and His lost ones found, and His lost 
ones to be found — in ignorance, perplexity, suf- 
fering, sin, living and dying — to be found! — 
a Seminary with a distinctive aim to constrain 
young men ever more and more, for four years 
to a vital, filial intimacy with God, and a cor- 
dial understanding — a working understanding 
with God, and at the same time, to a Christ- 
like sympathy and an apostolic aptitude for 
men, a Seminary whose thinking shall be Scrip- 
tural, rational, profound #nd Christo-centrlc. 
283 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

And now to be practical (or is it visionary?), 
why not forthwith acquire and rehabilitate dear 
old moribund Andover, annex it to Northfiekl, 
and rededicate it to New Testament Chris- 
tianity? 

Educated Christian young men, suffer a 
word of exhortation: Study for the ministry! 
On your part mind not meagerness or meanness 
of salary. When they were devoted to His 
and their Christ, in all their varied tribulations 
— their wrongs and sufferings at the hands of 
world, flesh and devil — or the Church, God has 
always taken thorough-going care of His serv- 
ants, and He will care for you ! Take not 
counsel of visible and superficial, temporary, 
earth-born objections ! 

Dr. Arthur J. Brown said of Rev. Boon-Itt, 
of Siam : "He is one of the most remarkable 
men I have met in Asia. At the head of his 
'clan,' whose family home is in Bangkok, he 
is widely and favorably known in the capital. 
Young men like him and resort to him for ad- 
284 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

vice, whenever he visits the city. The govern- 
ment has repeatedly offered him lucrative posts, 
and I was told by United States Minister King, 
that a trading corporation in Laos is eager to 
employ him at a salary of $4,000, gold. As a 
minister of Christ he receives $650 and a tum- 
ble-down native house, and he would rather be 
a missionary on those terms than an official 
or a trader on a higher salary." 

Of course he would, and this is simply an 
echo of universal testimony. In all the ages, 
whenever a man in the fear of God, and filled 
with intelligent passion for the Christ whom, 
in the intimacies of discipleship he has seen face 
to face, and actuated by a heaven-born redemp- 
tion zeal for lost men, has chosen to be a min- 
ister of the gospel, he has been exultingly glad 
of it first and last, even if he did sacrifice and 
suffer ! Young men, every great, every great- 
est thing, every primary, overtowering fact or 
factor in heaven or on earth calls you — if God 
will let you — calls you to be a minister of 
285 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Christ! The Immanuel of all earthly life in 
all things is preeminently, assuredly here. 
Thirty years ago, a dying missionary, with 
seventeen years of glad fidelity behind him, sud- 
denly aroused and to an unseen but real audi- 
ence cried : 

"Christian young men ! The responsibility 
of saving the world rests on you ; not on the old 
men, but on the young men. It is past the time 
for holding back and waiting for Trovidence.' 
I used to think a missionary ought to husband 
his strength; but this is a crisis in the world's 
history, and by keeping back, one may keep 
others back. Wisdom is profitable to direct, but 
the man that rushes to duty is faithful. At 
times, promptness becomes the rule and caution 
the exception. The Church is a military com- 
pany ; an army of conquest, not of occupation." 
Young Men, Forward ! 

Listen to Henry Ward Beecher who in his 
early home, and early ministry knew every 
form of poverty and strait, that couid deter a 
286 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Christian student,, standing on the threshold of 
the ministry. "Men say that the pulpit has run 
its career and that there is but little time before 
it will come to an end. Not so long as men 
continue to be weak and sinful and tearful and 
expectant, without any help near; not so long 
as the world lieth in wickedness ; not so long as 
there is an asylum over and above that one 
which we see with our physical senses ; not 
until men are transformed and the earth empty 
— not until then, will the work of the Christian 
ministry cease. ... It is the sweetest in sub- 
stance, the most enduring in its joys, the most 
content in its poverty and limits if your lot is 
cast in places of scarcity, more full of crowned 
hopes, more full of whispering messages from 
those gone before, nearer to the threshold, 
nearer to the throne, nearer to the heart of Him 
who was pierced, but who lives forever, and 
says, 'Because I live, ye shall live also.' " 

But first of all the call is to begin. As 
Horace Greeley safd : "The way to resume is 
287 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

to resume." And the way to have New Testa- 
ment Christianity on the earth, in full New 
Testament measure and according to the con- 
ceptions of God, is to begin it — and begin it at 
once and at the point of most urgent and invit- 
ing availability. 

Mrs. Sage, Miss Gould, John Wanamaker 
(pardon the personality!), and the "one hun- 
dred richest men" — "orthodox church mem- 
bers" discovered by Dr. Strong, would it not 
be in the line of a truly magnificent opportunity 
to provide at once for say, seven New Testa- 
ment missionaries — to go out under a ten years' 
contract? Let them be thoughtfully selected 
by men like John R. Mott, Robert E. Speer 
and W. R. Moody. Let there be perhaps of 
the mission force, four married, two single, and 
one medical — with one in some sense a super- 
intendent. Let them go out not only permitted 
but obliged to take care of themselves, select 
their own field and be their own "Secretaries." 
Paul and his fellow missionaries were sent out 
288 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and prayed for, by home Churches, but for mis- 
sion administration on the field, the Holy Spirit 
visited them directly. Above all let the seven 
be thoroughly Christian, and not much else — 
satisfied with and actuated by the most intense 
passion for the four Ends and the four Means 
of primitive, apostolic piety, and to whom in 
thought and heart and life, Christ is "All and 
in all'' ! Then let some $87,500 be securely in- 
vested, subject to their order, for salary and 
travel expense. This means indeed a slight 
advance over current missionary salaries. Does 
either heavenly bounty or earthly economy dis- 
countenance this ? From any point of view can 
the Church afford to give less? 

Wise Andrew Carnegie, in your just but al- 
together novel apprehension of dying a rich 
man, is there not here a rare — a most inviting 
avenue of relief? Why not finance Organized 
Christianity? Why not endow a re-baptised 
Andover? As a business man, like John Hay 
and a thousand others like-minded, who have 
289 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

believed in Christianity but repudiated its all 
overloading accessories, you can appreciate ends 
and means, economies and efficiencies, facts and 
principles. Is there any other cause which in- 
vites your "means" for such transcendent ends? 
You can appreciate too the melancholy plight 
of the young men, who for education, affilia- 
tion, and a field, want Christianity and have 
sectarianism. You can appreciate the follow- 
ing from the Presbyterian Westminster, of 
Philadelphia : "The Y. M. C. A. is, we believe, 
the institution which exhibits the most aggres- 
sive and wholesome phase of Christianity to be 
found on the globe. It sounds no trumpet 
before it, but acts and then announces. Where 
young men go, it goes. There is no hesitancy 
or indecision. It looks, sees, thinks, resolves, 
does. It must be dear to God. The story of 
its accomplishments is wonderful. Here is the 
latest exhibition of its vigilant energy. It re- 
quired two years for the Association to convince 
the authorities there could not be too much 
290 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

religion in Canal construction. But now the 
organization has a free hand. Within three 
months the Y. M. C. A. has contracted with 
the Canal Commission for the erection in the 
zone by the government of seven buildings in 
which, when completed, the five thousand or 
more young Americans in Panama may receive 
instruction, entertainment, and helpful fellow- 
ship." 

It is well to build a Peace Palace, and libra- 
ries, and schools and colleges. If now, you 
build up for peace and truth, apostolic Chris- 
tianity, with all heaven co-laboring, is it not 
certain that in due time and quite rewardingly 
you will hear from earth and heaven alike 
"Well done" ? Andrew Carnegie, "Think on 
these things" ! 

President Theodore Roosevelt (excuse the 
impertinence of your Long Island neighbor), 
the editors and politicians are much concerned 
about what you shall do at the close of your 
Presidential career. This do, Mr. President ; 
291 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

Take up and put through Organized Christian- 
ity! It will indeed not be as though "some 
strange thing had happened unto you." 

Henry Ward Beecher said of his noble 
father, that to the end of his days he retained 
the Nimrod instinct and to the last felt called 
and moved to go gunning for the devil. Could 
there be a nobler "sport" ? And could there be 
a nobler plan of prosecuting it, than that of 
indirect strategy in campaigning Organized 
Christianity? Will this not be surely con- 
genial to you? Does it not promise unfailing 
and most gratifying success ? 

You were favored of Heaven in negotiating 
peace between two contending nations of the 
East, and arresting war and the death and Heso- 
lations of it. Will it not be congenial to you, 
by pure and simple, God-ordered Christianity, 
to arrest the warring animosities, the spiritual 
conflicts of the sons of men, and leading them 
to the "peace which passeth all understanding," 
292 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

bring the tranquillity and life and love of 
heaven down to earth ? 

Will it not be congenial to you to look into 
the methods and transactions of that great cor- 
poration — the American Church? Does not 
this penurious and niggardly policy as to the 
ministers and their families deeply excite you? 
Are not alike your sense of justice, and kind- 
ness of heart awakened by the spectacle of the 
struggling miseries of noble men and gentle 
women and children, which are laid bare in the 
story that the average salary of the one hun- 
dred and fifty thousand ministers is but seven 
hundred dollars a year? And then for you too, 
the young men in what they ought to be and 
want to be as united Christians and what they 
must be as separated denominationalists ! 

Mr. President, you are alive to national ap- 
peals. The nations want Christianity and ask 
for it. They neither need nor want sectarian- 
ism. 

Paul was very intelligent. He would rather 
293 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

have been Apostle than President. Mr. Presi- 
dent, will it not be supremely gratifying to you, 
first and last, to have been both ? 

A. F. Schauffler, John R. Mott, Charles M. 
Alexander, Howard Agnew Johnston, John B. 
Devins (and by the way, Dr. Devins, why not 
at once re-launch the Observer as the organ of 
Organized Christianity?), Robert E. Speer, W. 
R. Moody, A. G. Moody, W. W. White, John 
Wanamaker, William Phillips Hall, Richard 
S. Holmes, J. Ross Stevenson, Albert E. Keig- 
win, C. E. Jefferson, A. C. Dixon, Wilton 
Merle Smith, and a great multitude which no 
man ought to be able to number : Is this not the 
time for new thought and radically new enter- 
prise for the restoration of Primitive Chris- 
tianity? Are not God in heaven and all the 
inhabitants of earth crowding upon you the 
ideals, the first things, the supreme claims, the 
imperative commission of Primitive Christian- 
ity ? And are they not calling for organization 
294 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and intelligent and scientific enterprise accord- 
ingly ? 

Listen to the denominational pronouncement 
and ultimatum : "What we are used to, we 
are attached to and want, and so it is neces- 
sarily normal and essential, and we shall prose- 
cute it to the utmost, at all times, anywhere, 
anyhow !" 

Listen to God's twentieth century proclama- 
tion : "Them that honor Me, I will honor" — 
and "You have got to confess Christ before 
men !" 

Listen to the maxim of solution : "Bible 
principles to please God, and business prin- 
ciples to win men !" 

To quote from Mark Guy Pearse : "The 
little lad reading some story becomes en- 
wrapped in the fortunes of his hero — difficulties 
and dangers thicken about him; his safety is 
threatened on all sides ; how shall it end ? Ex- 
cited and eager, he turns over the pages and 
looks further on. It is all right ; the hero lives 
295 



ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY 

and triumphs. Now the lad breathes again, 
and with a brave heart faces the course of the 
fight once more. We, like the little lad, have 
sometimes trembled for the fortunes of our 
King. Then it is good to skip the pages of 
time, and look at the end. It is all right. 'Al- 
leluia, the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth. The 
kingdoms of this world are become the King- 
dom of our Lord and of His Christ. And He 
shall reign forever and ever.' " 

Even so : in the meantime, What ? Who ? 



THE END 






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